The Campaign Is the Product

Overview and IntroductionAmerican campaign finance law watches money coming into politics with a microscope and money going out with a shrug. Every donor who gives more than $200 is identified and reported. On the spending side, there is essentially one rule: campaign funds cannot be used for personal expenses. This essay is about everything that rule does not prohibit, and how leadership PACs have largely sidestepped the law's central spending restriction.The rule applies only to a candidate's authorized campaign committee. Nearly every member of Congress also operates a second account called a leadership PAC, originally intended to raise money for and contribute to other candidates and party committees. The Federal Election Commission has concluded that the personal-use prohibition does not apply to these accounts, and the spending reflects that. Today, less than half of leadership PAC expenditures go to supporting other candidates or party committees. Instead, disclosure filings show that members of both parties spent on luxury hotels, exclusive golf clubs, resorts, fine dining, and other expenses. Even official campaign committees, where the personal-use rule does apply, have found approved workarounds. Members have charged their own campaigns interest on personal loans, paid family members millions in consulting fees, and kept campaign accounts open and spending for years after leaving office. Regulators have approved each of these practices.At presidential scale, the same vehicles move serious money. One leadership PAC has paid more than $60 million in legal bills for its founder and his allies, lawfully, funded largely by small donors who believed they were funding a political fight. A newer arrangement surrounds officials still in office: networks of nonprofits, committees, and trademarked brands, run by allies, that hold everything a future campaign needs while the official governs. Both parties have built these. At the bottom of the market sit outright scam PACs, which raise millions invoking candidates and causes and deliver almost none of it. Operators go to prison only when they lie explicitly. The legal operations achieve similar results with better paperwork.The conclusion is uncomfortable but follows from the record. Running for president can be a sound business plan even when losing is certain, because the donor list, the brand, and the leftover accounts all pay out regardless. None of this is a broken system. It is a corrupt system working precisely as the people who wrote its rules intended, and they are the only ones with the power to change it.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share it.ShareEvery American political campaign tells its donors the same story. Your contribution funds the fight. The money buys ads, organizers, yard signs, and get-out-the-vote operations. Victory is the product, and the donation is the purchase price.For a substantial and growing share of the money moving through American politics, that story is false. Not false in the sense of a lie told by one dishonest politician, but false in the structural sense: the legal architecture of campaign finance has evolved into a system in which the campaign itself is the product, the donor is the customer, and the political outcome is incidental to the revenue model. Sometimes, winning is no longer the driving factor in running for political office. Making money is. The clearest case is the leadership PAC and its darker cousins, the entities that orbit every serious presidential campaign like remoras around a shark.This is not a story about one party or one politician. The machinery serves incumbents and operators of both parties with perfect impartiality, which is precisely why neither party has any intention of dismantling it.The asymmetry at the heart of the lawThe Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and its successors built an elaborate regulatory apparatus around the inflow of political money. Contribution limits, source prohibitions, disclosure requirements, and reporting deadlines: the intake side of the pipe is monitored in exhaustive detail. Anyone who has filed an FEC report knows the level of granularity involved. Every donor over two hundred dollars is identified, along with an employer and address.The outflow side is a different world. For a candidate’s authorized campaign committee, the law imposes essentially one meaningful spending restriction: the prohibition on “personal use,” defined as spending campaign funds on any obligation that would exist irrespective of the campaign or the duties of federal office. A mortgage payment fails the test. A country club membership fails the test. Nearly everything else passes.And even that single restriction, it turns out, applies to only one of the several political accounts a candidate may control.Leadership PACs: The Second Campaign AccountA leadership PAC is a political committee established and controlled by a candidate or officeholder but legally separate from the authorized campaign committee. When these vehicles emerged in the late 1970s and proliferated through the 1980s and 1990s, their stated purpose was to allow ambitious members of Congress to raise money and distribute it to colleagues, building the alliances that lead to committee chairmanships and leadership posts. Congress did not even define the term in statute until 2008.The personal use prohibition, the one meaningful restriction on the spending side, has never been applied to leadership PACs. For years, the Federal Election Commission deadlocked three to three on whether the statute reached them. Then, in 2023, in an enforcement matter involving a former congressman’s leadership PAC, a majority of commissioners concluded that the personal use rules simply do not apply. What had long been a gray zone of non-enforcement became formal Commission precedent. The agency charged with policing campaign finance formally acknowledged that its principal spending restriction did not extend to one of the principal political accounts controlled by members of Congress.Campaign Legal CenterandIssue One, watchdog organizations that generally favor stronger campaign finance regulation but are widely respected for careful documentation, found that between 2013 and 2018, contributions to other candidates and party committees, the original justification for leadership PACs, accounted for only about 45 percent of spending.The majority of funds went elsewhere. During a single six-month period in 2018, leadership PACs spent more than $124,000 at the Greenbrier resort, more than $160,000 at St. Regis properties, more than $53,000 at Ritz-Carlton hotels, $46,000 at a single Washington steakhouse, and nearly $20,000 at Disney properties. The largest individual spender was John Thune, whose leadership PAC purportedly spent more than $403,000 at the Greenbrier Sporting Club alone.Other examples include:Sen. John Thune:$403,000at the Greenbrier Sporting Club.Rep. Pat Tiberi:$64,000on Broadway tickets.Rep. Tom Graves:$34,000at Sea Island Resort.Rep. Michael McCaul:$21,000in country club dues.Sen. Mitch McConnell:$4,000for limousine service in Rome.These were not Republicans behaving badly while Democrats abstained, or the reverse. The watchdog reports make clear that officeholders from both parties have used leadership PACs as lifestyle subsidies. Fifty-eight former members of Congress from both parties urged the FEC to close the loophole. The FEC itself has recommended, on five separate occasions since 2009 and again in 2023, that Congress extend the personal use prohibition to all political committees. Congress has declined every time.The only people with the authority to close the loophole are the people who benefit from it. The benefits are concentrated, immediate, and personal. The costs are spread across millions of small donors, each of whom loses fifty or a hundred dollars of the political purpose they thought they were funding, and none of whom will ever notice the loss individually. James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for explaining that politicians respond to incentives just like everyone else. Leadership PACs may be the clearest real-world demonstration of that principle in American public life.The Authorized Campaign LoopholesThe authorized campaign committee, the one political account actually covered by the personal use ban, has its own catalog of approved workarounds. The congressional record supplies the price list.A member can lend money to a campaign and charge interest. Grace Napolitano loaned her campaign $150,000 in 1998 at interest rates as high as 18 percent, and her donors ultimately paid her $221,780 in interest while the principal declined by only $64,727. In 1999, the FEC ruled that the arrangement complied with the law. Donors delivered the congresswoman a 147 percent return on a loan she made to herself, one contribution at a time.A campaign can also put the family on the payroll. FEC rules permit payments to a candidate’s relatives so long as they represent fair market value for bona fide services, and both definitions have proved remarkably elastic.Maxine Waters’ daughter has received more than $1.2 million from her mother’s campaign since 2004 for operating a slate mailer business used by virtually no other federal politician. Earlier, theLos Angeles Timesfound that the campaign had paid more than $1 million to family members over the preceding eight years.During the 2020 election cycle,Ilhan Omar’s campaignpaid roughly $2.9 million to her husband’s consulting firm before ending the arrangement amid public criticism.A 2012 report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington identified 82 members of Congress directing money to relatives through their offices, campaign committees, or PACs: 42 Republicans and 40 Democrats, the statistical equivalent of a coin flip.A campaign can even outlive the career it was created to finance. A 2018 investigation by theTampa Bay Timesand WTSP analyzed more than one million campaign expenditures and identified roughly 100 zombie campaign committees still spending money long after the candidate’s political life had ended. Twenty remained active for more than a decade. Eight continued spending after the candidate had died, paying for dinners, cell phone bills, and rent.One former congressman used his dormant campaign account to finance dinners on the Palm Beach social circuit. After the investigation, the FEC sent letters to about 50 committees, including those of Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, asking why the accounts remained open. Two former members took the concept one step further by converting leftover campaign committees into multicandidate PACs and continuing to spend the remaining funds there: the retirement version of the leadership PAC.Rep. Grace Napolitanocollectedmore than $220,000 in donor-funded interest paymentsthrough an arrangement the FEC expressly approved.Rep. Maxine Waters'family payroll likewise operated under rules the agency permits. The law does not distinguish by the amount extracted. It distinguishes by the mechanism.At the congressional level, leadership PAC spending means resort weekends and steakhouse tabs. At the presidential level, the same legal vehicle operates on an entirely different scale. The 2020 to 2024 cycle produced the defining case study.Save America, the leadership PAC controlled by Donald Trump, was registered with the FEC on November 9, 2020, two days after the election was called. It became the primary fundraising vehicle of his post-presidency, fueled largely by small dollar donations solicited around election integrity themes, with retirees accounting for more than 60 percent of contributors at one point. Because it was organized as a leadership PAC rather than a campaign committee, it operated outside the personal use ban.The PAC spent more than $60 million on legal fees for the principal and his allies. In the first half of 2023 alone, $21.6 million of its roughly $30 million in total spending went to legal bills, and nine of its ten largest vendors were law firms. Other disbursements included $650,000 for official portraits, six figures to a personal stylist, and seven-figure grants to nonprofit institutes staffed by former administration officials. Campaign finance lawyers across the political spectrum questioned the arrangement while acknowledging that it was likely permissible because the FEC had already concluded that the personal use ban does not apply to leadership PACs.Partisans naturally read this as an indictment of one man. That reading misses the larger point. The problem is structural. The legal architecture created a vehicle that allows a politician to convert small dollar political donations into personal legal defense, image management, and patronage for a professional entourage, all disclosed and all lawful under current Commission precedent. Given the existence of that vehicle, its eventual use at maximum scale was inevitable. If one politician had not taken it this far, another eventually would. The next one probably will, from whichever party next produces a candidate with a devoted small dollar base and substantial personal expenses.The donors believed they were financing political action. Much of what they financed instead was the operating budgetof a personal political enterprise.That gap between what donors believe they are buying and what their money actually funds is the essence of a grift, and it required no lawbreaking.When a political committee pays the legal bills of aides and associates, it changes incentives. The witness no longer bears the financial cost of his own legal defense. Instead, that cost is assumed by an organization controlled by, or acting on behalf of, the very person whose interests are at stake. Financial dependence creates loyalty even when no one asks for it.No instruction has to be given. The dependency does the work. Incentive structures shape behavior more reliably than orders ever could.The same logic extends well beyond campaign finance. It is the same incentive structure that appears throughout government, from pharmaceutical regulation to public health policy.The Democratic ModelDonald Trump demonstrated how a leadership PAC could become the center of a post-presidential political enterprise.The Democratic Party took a different approach. Rather than concentrating power in a leadership PAC, it built a network around the official campaign, joint fundraising committees, and one of the largest super PACs in American history.By March 2024,Biden for President, theBiden Victory Fund, and theBiden Action Fundhad collectively raised approximately$365 million, spent about$138 million, transferred roughly$79 millionto the Democratic National Committee and state parties, and retained a substantial cash reserve. These committees formed the official fundraising backbone of President Biden’s reelection effort.Outside the campaign satFuture Forward, an independent super PAC that became the financial heavyweight of the Democratic operation. Unlike Trump’s Save America leadership PAC, Future Forward was legally independent of the campaign and therefore permitted to raise unlimited contributions.By the end of the 2024 election cycle, Future Forward had raisedalmost a billion dollars, making it the largest single-candidate super PAC in American history. It spent roughly$450 millionon advertising, while an affiliated 501(c)(4) nonprofit handled more than$600 millionin additional political activity without publicly disclosing its donors.The organization was led byChauncey McLean, a veteran of the Obama political operation and founder of Future Forward, with longtime Democratic strategistAnita Dunnserving as one of its principal architects. Dunn is one of the Democratic Party's most influential political operatives, having served as a senior adviser to both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden before moving directly to Future Forward after leaving the White House. Her career has long drawn criticism for moving repeatedly between senior government positions, presidential campaigns, and the Washington consulting firm SKDK, whose corporate clients often had business before the federal government, making her emblematic of the revolving door between political power and influence consulting.Polling strategy was directed byDavid Shor, one of the Democratic Party's most prominent data scientists and architects of modern microtargeting. Financial backing came from billionaire donors, including **Michael Bloomberg,Bill Gates,James Simons, andReed Hastings, helping Future Forward become the largest single-candidate super PAC in American history.When President Biden withdrew from the race, the infrastructure scarcely missed a beat. Vice PresidentKamala Harrisinherited the official campaign committee, approximately$240 millionalready under campaign control, the Biden Victory Fund, the Biden Action Fund, and the full support of Future Forward. Within 24 hours, her campaign announced another $81 million in contributions, describing it as the largest single-day presidential fundraising in American history. The candidate changed. The political enterprise did not.The contrast with Trump’s operation is structural rather than partisan. Trump’s post-presidential organization centered on a leadership PAC. Biden’s and Harris’s centered on an official campaign, joint fundraising committees, and an extraordinarily well-funded super PAC. Different legal vehicles. The same underlying principle: modern presidential politics is no longer financed by a single campaign committee, but by an ecosystem of organizations designed to preserve money, staff, donor lists, and political influence long after any individual campaign begins or ends.The Warehoused CampaignThe leadership PAC stores political money between elections. Increasingly, politicians also store the next presidential campaign itself: its brand, donor lists, organizations, staff, and fundraising machinery, all maintained until the principal is free to run.The legal architecture makes this outcome almost inevitable. The Hatch Act bars covered federal employees, including cabinet secretaries, from becoming candidates for partisan office, and the Office of Special Counsel has interpreted that prohibition to reach preliminary campaign activity: any conduct that can reasonably be construed as seeking support for a future candidacy.If Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ultimately decide to run for president, they cannot simply build campaign organizations while remaining in office. At some point, they would have to leave their posts before becoming candidates.The law, however, creates an obvious alternative. While the principal remains in office, nothing prevents allies from maintaining the campaign’s political assets outside the government. Donor lists can be preserved. Leadership PACs can continue raising and spending money. Super PACs remain active. Nonprofit organizations can continue advocacy, list-building, branding, and grassroots organizing. Consultants stay employed. Digital infrastructure remains intact. The prospective candidate need only to resign and step into a political apparatus that has been maintained throughout his tenure in office, once they formally file the necessary paperwork to run for office.The law prohibits the principal from openly assembling a presidential campaign while permitting others to assemble one around him. The predictable result is a campaign held in escrow. The candidate waits. The campaign does not.At the same time, Senate-confirmed presidential appointees are among the least restricted federal employees under the Hatch Act. They may engage in partisan political activity, even during working hours, so long as they do not use their official title, government resources, or solicit political contributions. The law prevents the principal from assembling a campaign while permitting allies to assemble one around him. The predictable result is a campaign held in escrow: allies maintain the brand, donor lists, committees, and political infrastructure while the officeholder governs. A resignation letter is the only document separating the warehouse from the launch. Note also that thePresident and Vice President are largely exempt from the Hatch Act.Both parties have built versions of this structure. Organizing for Action, the 501(c)(4) created from Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, spent his second term promoting the sitting president’s agenda using his campaign’s email list and organizing apparatus, financed by donors whose identities were not publicly disclosed. Republicans at the time described it as an unprecedented merger of governing and campaigning. Mike Pence established the Great America Committee in 2017, becoming the first sitting vice president to operate a leadership PAC, while raising millions of dollars in office. Scott Pruitt maintained a legal defense fund while serving as EPA administrator.The most fully developed version now surrounds the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy applied to trademark the Make America Healthy Again slogan in 2024, disclosed in ethics filings that he had earned $100,000 from the brand, and transferred the trademark application to an ally’s LLC in December 2024, weeks before his confirmation. Around that trademark now stands an entire political ecosystem: a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization he co-founded before taking office, managed by veterans of his presidential campaign and advertising itself as the continuation of the campaign’s digital and grassroots operation; a policy institute; a super PAC renamed from his presidential super PAC and held in reserve; an educational nonprofit that purchased a Super Bowl advertisement promoting the administration’s message; and a holding company involving a family member (his son), registered at the same law firm address as the LLC controlling the trademark. The secretary appears at the network’s summits and campaigns for the administration’s agenda in battleground districts, activities permitted under the Hatch Act for officials of his rank.Speculation about a 2028 presidential campaign has circulated openly. Kennedy has publicly denied any intention of running. Whether he ultimately does is beside the point. The political infrastructure already exists. It requires no declaration of candidacy. It requires only that the assets be maintained.Some supporters have discussed creating a MAHA political party. That would introduce a novel feature into American politics: a political party whose name and identity are protected intellectual property controlled by a private LLC. Historically, political parties have belonged, in the civic sense, to their members. A trademarked party would instead depend on whoever controls the mark. Its candidates, committees, and state organizations could operate only with the owner’s permission, under whatever terms the owner establishes. Donations to such a party would simultaneously support a political movement and reinforce the value of a privately controlled brand.None of this is an indictment of the movement itself or of its supporters, many of whom are responding to institutional failures that this publication has documented for years. It is another illustration of the same structural problem that runs through this essay. The architecture predates this movement, has been used by both parties, and will outlive whoever occupies it next. A legal regime that prohibits an officeholder from assembling a campaign while allowing allies to assemble one around him should not be surprised when every ambitious politician acquires a warehouse. The only variables are whose name appears on the filings and which party occupies the office.Scam PACsIf the leadership PAC is grift wearing a suit, the scam PAC is grift in its purest form. The political cause is little more than a costume.A scam PAC is a political committee that raises money by invoking a candidate or sympathetic cause, then routes nearly all of it to fundraising vendors and consultants controlled by the operators themselves. The mechanics are remarkably consistent. Robocalls and direct mail target elderly donors with urgent appeals: support the president, back the police, help autistic children, defend the border. The money arrives. The committee then reports spending 85 to 95 percent of its receipts on “fundraising,” “consulting,” and “compliance,” with payments flowing to limited liability companies that share an address, an incorporation date, and often even a home address with the PAC’s own treasurer. The circle closes. Almost nothing reaches the candidate or cause.William and Robert Tierney, two brothers from Arizona, operated a network of nine scam PACs between 2014 and 2017 that invoked law enforcement, autism awareness, the pro-life movement, and other sympathetic causes. They collected $23 million, forwarded less than one percent to the advertised causes, routed most of the money through shell companies and telemarketing firms they controlled, and pocketed millions themselves. William Tierney ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and served a federal prison sentence.Kelley Rogers, a Maryland political consultant, operated the Conservative Majority Fund, Conservative StrikeForce, and Tea Party Majority Fund. Beginning in 2012, the Conservative Majority Fund alone raised nearly $10 million while contributing just $48,400 to actual candidates and political committees. Rogers pleaded guilty to wire fraud after admitting that donor solicitations falsely promised support for candidates, election integrity efforts, and veterans while the money instead flowed back to him, his associates, and additional fundraising.Another operator,Thomas Tunstall, raised more than half a million dollars in 2016 by invoking candidates from both parties, spent less than a penny of every dollar on politics, and used donor money for travel, liquor, room service, and other personal expenses. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison.During the 2022 election cycle, OpenSecrets identified 86 committees fitting the scam PAC profile.One thing separates the prosecuted cases from the legal ones, and it is not the flow of money. In both, donor dollars come in, vendors and insiders are paid, and little reaches the advertised political purpose. The difference is provable fraud. The scam PAC operator goes to prison because he explicitly promises that donations will support a candidate or cause when they will not.Leadership PACs and consultant-heavy campaigns can produce a remarkably similar economic result while remaining within the law because their solicitations are carefully drafted and the legal vehicles are permissive enough that no specific promise is violated. The criminal cases define the boundary by contrast. The line is not drawn at taking donors’ money for purposes they never intended. It is drawn at being careless enough to promise something more specific.The FEC has repeatedly stated that it lacks statutory authority to police fraudulent political solicitations and has asked Congress to provide it. Congress has declined. Instead, the worst cases are prosecuted by the Department of Justice under federal wire fraud statutes, usually only after the conduct becomes egregious enough to attract criminal attention.Meanwhile, the agency charged with overseeing campaign finance was deliberately designed with an even number of commissioners divided equally between the two parties, making deadlock the expected outcome whenever the political interests of both parties align. This is more than regulatory failure. It is regulatory design. A referee who cannot blow the whistle is not a bug in the system. He is one of its features.The Political EcosystemThe leadership PAC rarely operates alone. Around every modern presidential candidate now orbits an entire political ecosystem, with each organization occupying its own regulatory niche: the authorized campaign committee, the leadership PAC, one or more super PACs, joint fundraising committees that divide a single donation among multiple accounts according to formulas few donors ever read, 501(c)(4) advocacy organizations that need not disclose their donors at all, and allied institutes that employ the candidate’s people between election cycles. Money moves among these entities through transfers, refunds, shared vendors, and affiliated organizations that are individually disclosed but collectively difficult to follow. A donation solicited for one purpose can ultimately finance another after passing through organizations governed by entirely different rules.Layered on top is the consulting economy. FEC reports disclose payments only to the vendor of record, not to subcontractors, so a campaign can lawfully report hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to a single LLC while the ultimate distribution of those funds remains invisible. Political media consultants have traditionally been compensated as a percentage of advertising purchases, meaning the people advising a campaign how much advertising to buy are often paid in proportion to the amount spent. The donor list itself, the email and text-message database built by every serious campaign, is another durable asset. It can be rented, licensed, and repeatedly solicited for years after the last ballot is counted. For a certain class of candidacy, the donor list becomes the real product, and the campaign becomes the mechanism for building it.Viewed this way, a presidential campaign is more than a contest for public office. It is also the creation of a durable political enterprise that can outlive the election itself. Winning is only one possible return on investment. A campaign can produce a nationally recognized brand, a valuable donor list, advocacy organizations, consulting contracts, speaking fees, book deals, and a permanent fundraising operation. For some candidates, especially those with little prospect of victory, those assets may ultimately prove more valuable than the office they sought.A presidential run, even a hopeless one, especially a hopeless one, is a rational business venture.Why Losing PaysThe naive model of a presidential campaign says the expected value of running equals the probability of winning multiplied by the value of the presidency. By that arithmetic, a candidate polling at one percent is engaged in an expensive act of vanity. The model is wrong because it counts only one asset, that is winning, on the balance sheet. A modern presidential campaign produces several others, and none requires victory.The first is the donor list. A national campaign is the most efficient list-building instrument in American politics. A strong debate performance or viral interview can generate hundreds of thousands of email addresses and small-dollar donors in a matter of days. Those names become a durable revenue-producing asset. They can be rented, licensed where permitted, and repeatedly solicited for years. They seed every subsequent enterprise: the next campaign, the advocacy nonprofit, the podcast, the newsletter, the book launch, now -even merchandise and fees on trademarked items and phrases. Certain perennial candidates are best understood as operating the same list-building business every four years, with the presidential primary serving as the marketing campaign.The second is the brand. The title “former presidential candidate” permanently increases speaking fees, book advances, media contracts, and board appointments. Mike Huckabee built a national television career after his presidential campaigns. Marianne Williamson transformed long-shot presidential bids into bestselling books, speaking tours, and a vastly larger audience. Campaigns also create the audience that later buys those books. Bulk purchases by campaigns and allied committees have repeatedly helped political books reach bestseller lists, while the royalties belong to the author, not the donors who financed the publicity.The third asset is the residual political apparatus. When the campaign ends, the infrastructure often survives. Leftover funds can remain in campaign committees, migrate into leadership PACs where permitted, or be supplemented by super PACs, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations that continue operating between election cycles. Staff disperse but often reunite. The donor list continues producing revenue. The campaign may close. The political enterprise rarely does.The fourth asset is political positioning. Even unsuccessful presidential campaigns purchase valuable political assets: consideration for the vice presidency, Cabinet appointments, influence over the party platform, leverage within the donor network, and an early claim on the next open cycle. George H. W. Bush, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Lyndon Johnson all sought the presidency before reaching the vice presidency, while Pete Buttigieg, Tom Vilsack, and others translated unsuccessful presidential campaigns into Cabinet posts.The fifth asset belongs less to the candidate than to the entourage. Consultants, fundraisers, pollsters, media buyers, direct-mail firms, and digital strategists are paid whether the campaign wins or loses. In many cases, their compensation increases with the amount of money raised and spent rather than the number of delegates won. The people advising a marginal candidate whether to run are often the same people whose firms profit if the answer is yes. Few participants in that conversation have a financial incentive to recommend staying out.Against these potential rewards, the candidate risks remarkably little personal capital. Donors finance the venture. When campaigns collapse, unpaid vendors often recover only pennies on the dollar, while the enduring assets remain with the candidate: the donor list, the national brand, the political organization, and the relationships built along the way. The gains are largely private. Much of the financial risk belongs to someone else.That arithmetic explains why crowded presidential primary fields have become the norm. Campaigns that make little sense as electoral propositions can make perfect sense as business propositions. The system does not merely tolerate the long-shot candidacy. It often rewards it. Every campaign announcement from a candidate polling within the margin of error should therefore be read in two ways: as a bid for the presidency, and as the launch of a valuable political enterprise.ShareWhat the Donor Actually BuysNone of this means political giving is foolish or that everyone who works in politics is corrupt. Most campaign staff work brutal hours for modest pay because they genuinely believe their candidate matters.This essay is not about character. It is about architecture. Systems that reward extraction inevitably produce extractors. The names change. The incentives do not. Consultants from both parties attend the same conferences, hire the same vendors, and defend the same loopholes because those loopholes are the shared property of the professional political class, perhaps the only truly bipartisan institution in Washington.The small donor responding to an urgent text message deserves to know where that money can actually go once it leaves his bank account. Some of it will advance the cause he intended to support. Some will pay the consultant who wrote the text and the vendor who delivered it. Some may ultimately settle into a leadership PAC, a nonprofit, or another political vehicle operating under entirely different rules. It may finance a resort weekend, a legal defense, a portrait, a media campaign, or the next political enterprise.Campaign finance law promised to clean up political money.Instead, it built a system that regulates in extraordinary detail how money enters politics. The consequence being that the donor has no right to financial privacy. But the politicians and their political cohorts have remarkably broad discretion over financial opacity, as there are few limits on how the money is spent.What emerges is not an accidental loophole. It is a predictable consequence of the rules themselves.Free subscriptions help us reach more readers. 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“Zombie Campaigns,” January 2018. https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2018/investigations/zombie-campaigns/spending-millions-after-office/Tampa Bay Times, “FEC to Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and 48 More Zombie Campaigns: Why Are You Still Here?,” May 2019. https://www.tampabay.com/investigations/2019/05/30/fec-to-mitt-romney-michele-bachmann-and-48-more-zombie-campaigns-why-are-you-still-here/Campaign Legal Center, “Zombie Campaign Redux: Former Members of Congress Continue to Use Leftover Campaign Cash as Personal Slush Funds,” March 2019. https://campaignlegal.org/update/zombie-campaign-redux-former-members-congress-continue-use-leftover-campaign-cash-personalABC News, “Trump PAC Spent Millions on Legal Bills This Year as His Charges Mount,” August 2023. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-pac-spent-40m-legal-bills-year-charges/story?id=101853565CNN, “Legal Fees: Trump Leadership PAC’s Soaring Bills Outstrip What It Raised Last Month,” March 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/20/politics/legal-bills-trump/index.htmlForbes, “Trump’s Save America PAC Has Paid Nearly $50 Million to Ex-President’s Lawyers Since First Indictment,” March 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/03/21/trump-lawyers-paid-nearly-50-million-from-political-pac-since-first-indictment/Wikipedia, “Save America,” accessed July 2026, aggregating New York Times, CBS News, Fox News, and FEC filings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_AmericaOpenSecrets, “How ‘Scam PACs’ Line Their Pockets by Deceiving Political Donors,” August 2023. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/08/how-scam-pacs-line-their-pockets-by-deceiving-political-donors/Brennan Center for Justice, “Beware of Scam PACs in This Crowded Presidential Field,” March 2019. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/beware-scam-pacs-crowded-presidential-fieldAARP, “Fake PACs Cheat Campaign Donations from Older Americans,” December 2019. https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/scam-pacs/Zhao Li, “Lemons in the Political Marketplace: A Big-Data Approach to Detect ‘Scam PACs,’” Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University. https://csdp.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf2376/files/media/zhao_li_lemons_in_the_political_marketplace.pdfABA Journal, “Federal Government Warns of an Increase in ‘Scam PACs’ as Election Nears,” June 2024. https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/federal-government-warns-of-an-increase-in-scam-pacs-as-election-nearsU.S. Office of Special Counsel, “Hatch Act Frequently Asked Questions.” https://www.osc.gov/services/hatch-act/faq/U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Solicitor, “Political Activities and the Hatch Act,” 2025 guidance. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/SOL/files/2025%20-%20Political%20Activities%20Guidance.pdfWashington Post, “RFK Jr. Sought to Trademark MAHA for Vaccine Marketing, Transferred to Ally,” January 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/01/29/rfk-del-bigtree-make-america-healthy-again-trademark/Axios, “Scoop: Move by RFK Jr.’s PAC Fuels Speculation About 2028 Campaign,” July 16, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/07/16/rfk-jr-pac-2028-speculationThe Hill, “RFK Jr.: ‘I Am Not Running for President in 2028,’” August 2025. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5454652-kennedy-jr-denies-2028-run/Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, “MAHA: A Who’s Who of Groups That Bear the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Slogan in Their Names,” November 2025. https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/maha-a-whos-who-of-groups-that-bear-the-make-america-healthy-again-slogan-in-their-names/Boston Globe, “Meet Tony Lyons, the Man Building RFK Jr.’s MAHA Empire,” March 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/25/nation/tony-lyons-maha-rfk-jr/The Hill, “RFK Jr. Promotes MAHA in Key House Battlegrounds Ahead of Midterms,” June 2026. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5931217-kennedy-white-house-midterms/InfluenceWatch, “MAHA Action,” accessed July 2026. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/maha-action/RWM/JGM

Summary: Leadership PACs, scam PACs, and the architecture of legal grift


Round-up of Weird News

Florida Man Pokes the BearThere are bad ideas. There are Florida Man ideas. And then there is allegedly stealing Smokey Bear signs from state forests across Florida and listing them on Facebook Marketplace for $1,900 apiece.Federal prosecutors say 30-year-old Hunter Drake Lovett traveled around the state collecting the iconic wildfire prevention signs before trying to cash in online. Unfortunately for him, Smokey Bear apparently has friends in federal law enforcement. A grand jury has now indicted Lovett on a charge of theft of government property, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of ten years in federal prison if he is convicted.Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson may have summed it up best after the suspect’s arrest last year: “What happens when dumb criminals poke the bear?” Apparently, the bear calls the U.S. Department of Justice.Only in Australia: Prime Minister Plays “Shag, Marry, Date”For American readers, Anthony Albanese is Australia’s prime minister, which makes him the head of government. In other words, imagine the president going on a comedy podcast and being asked which famous woman he would “shag.”That is roughly what happened.Albanese appeared on theBush Deeppodcast, where the host asked him to play “shag, marry, date”.  For those unfamiliar with Australian culture, "Shag, Marry, Date" is a party game where you're handed three names and forced to make increasingly awkward relationship decisions. It's the kind of thing stupid college students play after midnight. It is not generally considered a useful exercise in international diplomacy.Given the choices: Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman, and Rhonda Burchmore, Albanese first tried to wriggle out by noting he had only been married for six months. Then, when pressed, he picked Kylie. When asked if that meant he would “marry Kylie and shag her and date her,” he replied, “All of the above.”Kylie Minogue occupies a unique place in Australian culture and she’s been a media hit for four decades. Think of her as if Dolly Parton, Madonna, and apple pie somehow became a single person. Criticizing her is considered poor form. Fantasizing about her while serving as prime minister turns out to be even worse.And that, children, is how a sitting prime minister turns a podcast game into a national incident.By Monday, Albanese had apologized, and the nation spent part of its week debating whether its prime minister had been sexist, stupid, or simply too Australian for his own good.The rest of us learned two things. First, never play middle-school sleepover games when you are running a country. Second, only Australians could create a political scandal involving a prime minister, Kylie Minogue, and the word “shag.”Thanks for readingMalone News. If you enjoyed this week's descent into absurdity, share it with a friend. it.ShareThe Great 7-Up ConspiracyHere’s a little reminder that just because everyone “knows” something doesn’t make it true.For almost a century, the accepted origin story of 7-Up has been that it was originally calledBib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodabefore eventually becoming the much catchier 7-Up. It’s one of those delightful historical facts that appears in books, newspapers, documentaries, trivia games, and approximately 97% of internet articles about the soft drink.But a deep dive into the original advertisements, trademarks, bottle labels, and company records suggests there is remarkably little evidence that the soda was ever officially sold under that tongue-twisting name.Emma Baccellieri, who did the detective work in her excellent Substack,The Soda Fountain, writes:There is, however, a second thing you will learn while researching the origin of the name 7Up, and this is that it was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.It’s everywhere. This is onWikipedia. It’s onSnopes. They ran it once inTIME. Look at in this article published byMcGill University. There is seemingly no debate about the fact that it was first named Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. (And it did contain a bit of real, honest-to-god, mood-enhancing lithium, at least until the FDA banned it from soft drinks after World War II.) The claim pops up in every piece of writing about the soda’s name. Grigg launched the drink in Missouri in the late 1920s, and he’d renamed it 7Up by the middle of the 1930s, but its early years were seemingly definitively spent as Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.Which struck me as insane.Baccellieri dug deeper.She discovered that “Bib-Label” appears to have referred to the paper label hanging around the neck of the bottle, like a bib, rather than the drink itself. Somewhere along the way, someone misunderstood the term, someone else copied it, and then everyone copied everyone else until it became “history.”The really funny part? The drinkdidcontain lithium citrate, a compound now used to treat bipolar disorder, until regulators eventually banned it from soft drinks. So the part that sounds completely insane turns out to be true, while the part everyone confidently repeats may be the myth.It is, perhaps, the perfect modern parable: never underestimate humanity’s ability to repeat the wrong fact with absolute confidence for nearly a century.After all, if we can collectively invent the origin story of 7-Up, imagine what else we’ve managed to get wrong.The Annual Disease Marketing CalendarWe’ve noticed a recurring feature of modern science journalism. First comes the alarming headline about a disease you’ve never heard of. Then comes the expert explaining why you should. Within days, there’s a story about a brand-new test to detect it, followed shortly by a promising treatment. Sometimes there’s a vaccine. Sometimes it’s a diagnostic company. Sometimes it’s both. It’s almost as predictable as pumpkin spice season, only with more PCR and fear mongeringMeet “Disease X”Just when you thought you had finally memorized COVID, mpox, bird flu, and the rest of the alphabet soup, the World Health Organization has another one waiting in the wings:Disease X. Fortunately, it isn’t an actual disease. It’s the WHO’s placeholder name for a future, as-yet-unknown pathogen that could someday spark the next pandemic.The idea has actually been around for a while. In2018, the WHO formally added Disease X to its list of priority pathogens, arguing that the next pandemic might come from something entirely unknown. In2019, public health agencies ran “Disease X” pandemic exercises. By2020, many experts declared that COVID-19 had effectively become the first real Disease X.Then, in2023, the United Kingdom announced a new high-containment research center specifically to prepare for Disease X, with the goal of developing diagnostics and vaccines within 100 days of identifying a new threat. The concept surged back into headlines during the2024 World Economic Forummeeting in Davos.One of the more surreal moments in public health came from a 2023 international survey of infectious disease specialists. Asked which pathogens posed the greatest pandemic threat, nearly four out of five chose influenza, a perfectly sensible answer. But thesecondmost common response wasn’t Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, or even SARS-CoV-2. It wasDisease X: an organism that, by definition, does not exist.Nearly half of the experts ranked an imaginary future pathogen among the world’s greatest infectious threats. One has to admire the confidence. It’s rather like asking military generals which foreign army worries them most, and hearing, “The one that hasn’t been discovered yet.” Planning for the unknown is prudent. Ranking an unnamed, undiscovered microbe above real pathogens that actually kill people every year is where preparedness begins to drift into philosophy.Over the past year, the WHO has continued emphasizing “plug-and-play” vaccine platforms, rapid diagnostics, and surveillance systems that could respond to an unknown pathogen. They have also ramped up the fear porn over disease X:There is something wonderfully Orwellian about spending years discussing, funding, modeling, and building diagnostics and vaccines for a disease that, by definition, does not yet exist. One can only imagine the marketing campaign:“Introducing our newest test...for something we haven’t found yet.”Like what you read? Subscribe. It's free. If you really like what you read, become a paid subscriber and help keep the caffeine flowing.JGM

Summary: Florida Man Pokes the Bear


Well Being: The Processed Meat Problem

Audio VersionA Series About Ham, Hot Dogs, Science, and What We Lost Along the WayWe are told that processed meat is bad for us.The World Health Organization says processed meat is linked to colorectal cancer. Many peer-reviewed studies associate it with shorter lifespan, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. Headlines are often blunt: bacon is bad, ham is bad, sausage is bad, hot dogs are bad.But there is a problem hiding inside that simple warning.What, exactly, is processed meat?Is a hot dog the same thing as Prosciutto di Parma? Is bologna the same thing as Jamón Ibérico? Is canned luncheon meat the same thing as a Virginia country ham, dry-cured with salt and aged for months in a smokehouse?From a regulatory and epidemiological standpoint, these foods are usually grouped together. From a food-science standpoint, they are radically different.For most of human history, meat preservation was not an industrial trick. It was a survival skill. Curing required salt, smoke, air, time, and beneficial microbes, which allowed families to preserve the harvest, survive winter, and create some of the world’s most beloved foods. Virginia country ham, Italian prosciutto, Spanish jamón, bresaola, salami, and traditional smoked meats all come from this old world of preservation. This is a vastly different process than what passes for cured meats now.Long aging gave way to rapid “curing.” Whole-muscle meats gave way to emulsified products. Smokehouses gave way to factories. Salt and time were increasingly replaced by injected brines, nitrites, phosphates, binders, fillers, artificial flavorings, and industrial processing.And yet, in much of the scientific literature, these very different foods are often collapsed into one category: processed meat.This series is an attempt to take that category apart.Executive SummaryThe central question is simple:Are all processed meats biologically equivalent, or has nutrition science lumped together foods that should be studied separately?The evidence linking processed meat to disease is real, but it is also more complicated than the headlines suggest. Much of it comes from observational studies, where correlation does not automatically prove causation. The reported risks are often relative risks, not absolute risks. Understanding the difference is essential because an impressive-sounding relative increase may translate into only a small change in actual lifetime risk. And the exposure category itself is crude.A 50-gram serving of processed meat could mean a hot dog, a slice of bologna, deli ham, bacon, dry-cured salami, prosciutto, country ham, or jamón. These foods differ in curing chemistry, additives, smoke exposure, fermentation, water content, microbial ecology, and degree of industrial processing.The SeriesPart One: The Death of Virginia HamA look at the lost American tradition of country ham, smokehouses, family curing, and how Virginia’s once-famous ham culture faded into industrial pork - now mostly owned and operated by Chinese companies.Part Two: When Did Ham Become “Processed Meat”?A food-science primer on the difference between salt curing, dry aging, fermentation, smoking, nitrite curing, pump curing, and modern emulsified meat products.Part Three: What Does the Science Actually Prove and The Nitrite Question?A careful look at the WHO/IARC claims, the peer-reviewed literature, relative versus absolute risk, correlation versus causation, and the limits of food-frequency epidemiology.This includes an examination of curing salts, nitrate, nitrite, nitrosamines, smoke compounds, heme iron, and the plausible mechanisms by which some processed meats may increase risk.Part Four: The Meat Processing ContinuumA proposed framework that separates traditional preserved meats from modern industrial products, from Prosciutto di Parma and Virginia country ham to hot dogs, bologna, Spam, and ultra-processed deli meats.Part Five: What Should We Actually Eat?A practical conclusion: how to think about preserved meats without panic, nostalgia, or public-health oversimplification. What products are traditionally cured, and how to read labels.Because "processed meat" is not a single food. It is a broad category that encompasses products with profoundly different ingredients, preservation methods, and food chemistry. Before we can understand the science, we first have to understand what is actually being studied.Part One: The Death of Virginia HamNearly a decade ago, we moved to Madison County, Virginia.Many of you know the story. We purchased what was essentially abandoned farmland. The house had been empty for years. Most of the fields had long since surrendered to weeds, brush, and trees. There were no gardens, no livestock, and little evidence of the generations of families who had once worked this land. The soil was dirt- worn out and dead. Over the years, we have slowly rebuilt it into the homestead we had imagined: pastures, gardens, horses, cattle, poultry, orchards, living earth, and the rhythms of a working farm.But the history of the place remained largely hidden.Who had lived here? What had they grown? How had they farmed? What did life look like on this land before tractors, herbicides, refrigerated trucks, and industrial agriculture? Some clues were scattered across the property, hidden under vines, buried in the dirt, and in outbuildings. To this day, we still find bits and pieces from the old farm and quarry - little treasures of the past. Some, such as the heavy-duty ham hook found under the roof of the ruined barn, are reminders that even happy pigs end up being slaughtered, and for this farm, that was no different. But one major clue was impossible to miss.Nearly every old outbuilding, and even parts of the original house, were filled with pig manure. Not fresh manure, of course, but manure so old it had become almost geological and hard as concrete. Removing it required power chisels, demolition hammers, and a great deal of persistence. It had likely been accumulating for generations before the farm was abandoned. At one time,  this had clearly been a pig farm.That discovery led us down an unexpected path. As longtime students of agricultural history, we began reading about farming in Madison County and throughout Virginia before modern agriculture transformed the landscape. What we found was a forgotten world.For much of Virginia’s history, pigs were among the most valuable animals on the farm. They converted acorns, chestnuts, forest mast, crop waste, and kitchen scraps into meat that could feed a family year-round. Every autumn brought butchering season. Families gathered to salt hams, smoke bacon, render lard, make sausage, and preserve enough pork to last until the following year. The smokehouse was not an accessory. It was as essential to the farm as the barn itself. In fact, on many old farms,  those old smokehouses survive: repurposed into storage sheds or chicken coops. Remnants of a past no longer.As transportation improved and markets expanded, these family traditions grew into a thriving commercial industry. Farmers no longer cured every ham themselves. Many raised hogs and sold them to local curing houses, where the same basic techniques: salt, smoke, air, and time, were simply practiced on a larger scale. Virginia country ham became one of the Commonwealth’s signature products, recognized throughout the United States and abroad. For generations, remarkably little changed. Then, beginning after World War II, the industry entered one of the most profound transformations in its history.Refrigeration transformed food distribution. Consumers, maybe due to marketing campaigns, increasingly preferred milder, moister hams over the intensely flavored country hams their grandparents had prized. Advances in meat science introduced faster curing methods, controlled refrigeration, injected brines, nitrite curing, phosphates, and new techniques that dramatically shortened production time while improving consistency and shelf life. Universities such as Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, and the University of California, Davis became leaders in the emerging discipline of meat science. With funding from big ag and the chemical industry, these agricultural research stations helped develop technologies that enabled meat to be produced efficiently at an industrial scale.The result was not simply a larger ham industry. It was an entirely different one.The slow rhythms of salt, smoke, and aging gradually gave way to rapid curing, centralized processing, and mass production. Small local curing houses disappeared. Family smokehouses were abandoned. Traditional Virginia country ham became a specialty product instead of an everyday staple, and much of the industry’s infrastructure simply vanished.Today, only a handful of traditionalVirginia country ham producersremain. The working smokehouses that once dotted the countryside have largely disappeared. Many local curing houses closed decades ago, unable to compete with industrial processing, changing consumer tastes, and the economics of mass production.There was another cost as well: the pigs themselves. On the old Virginia farm, pigs were not widgets in a supply chain. They were animals raised outdoors or in small farm lots, fed mast, scraps, corn, garden waste, and whatever the farm could provide. Their lives were seasonal, local, and tied to the land. As pork production industrialized, the pig increasingly disappeared from the pasture and moved into confinement barns, where thousands of animals could be bred, fed, medicated, and brought to market on a controlled schedule.The center of Virginia hog production shifted heavily toward Southern Virginia, where large production units still remain, although modern hog farms are now scattered across the state. The larger national system, however, is centered far more heavily in North Carolina and the Midwest, where vertically integrated pork companies built the modern confinement model. What vanished was not only the old country ham. The old country pig vanished with it. Pigs in Madison County are now as rare as hen’s teeth.For much of Virginia’s history, pigs were among the most valuable animals on the farm, and for good reason. Before synthetic fertilizers, refrigerated transportation, and industrial feedlots, pigs were central to a regenerative farming system that wasted almost nothing. They converted what people could not eat: acorns, chestnuts, hickory nuts, fallen fruit, crop residues, dairy byproducts, kitchen scraps, and garden waste, into one of the most nutritious and calorie-dense foods available. Their manure returned fertility to the soil. Their rooting incorporated organic matter, loosened compacted ground, and helped prepare new areas for cultivation. Nearly every part of the animal was used, from the hams and bacon to the lard, organs, skin, and bones. A healthy pig was not simply a source of pork; it was an essential link in the natural cycle that connected forests, fields, gardens, livestock, and people.The old Virginia pig spent much of its life outdoors. In autumn, farmers often turned their hogs into the forests dominated by large oak trees and, before the chestnut blight, chestnut forests to forage on the annual mast crop; the bounty of acorns, chestnuts, and other tree nuts that blanketed the forest floor every fall. Those woods became nature’s finishing pen. As the pigs rooted through leaves in search of acorns, nuts, roots, fungi, insects, grubs, and other invertebrates, they disturbed the cool, damp leaf litter where ticks and many other pests thrive. They helped recycle nutrients, reduced accumulated forest debris, and converted the bounty of the woodland into food for the farm. Their value extended far beyond the smokehouse. They were engineers of the farm ecosystem, quietly performing work that today is often replaced by machinery, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and purchased feed. Looking back, it is remarkable how many jobs one animal once performed simply by being allowed to live as a pig.ShareThe irony is hard to miss.Virginia gave America one of its most iconic food traditions. Yet today, the largest pork processor in the United States, the company whose very name became synonymous with Virginia ham, is no longer controlled from Virginia, or even from the United States. Smithfield Foods, the successor to much of that once-local industry, is controlled by Hong Kong-listed WH Group, following its acquisition in 2013.Today, the company that dominates American pork processing is controlled by a Chinese corporation operating under the legal and political authority of the People's Republic of China, the CCP.An image from the EPA of a “hog confinment farm” - otherwise known as a factory farm.At the same time, companies like Boar’s Head remain family-owned and market themselves as premium deli brands built on craftsmanship and tradition. Yet most of their products are manufactured using industrial curing methods that bear little resemblance to the slow, dry-cured hams once hanging in Virginia smokehouses.Somewhere along the way, “Virginia ham” ceased to describe a centuries-old method of preserving pork and became simply another product on the supermarket shelf.That transformation raises a much larger question than who owns the companies. It forces us to ask whether we have also lost the language to describe the food itself.Today, a hot dog, a slice of deli ham, a traditional Virginia country ham, Prosciutto di Parma, and Jamón Ibérico are all commonly placed into the same scientific category: “processed meat.”That may be convenient for the regulators and epidemiologists at the World Health Organization. But is it scientifically meaningful?When scientists study “processed meat,” what exactly are they studying?Are they studying a hot dog manufactured from finely emulsified meat, cured with nitrite, phosphates, and multiple additives? Or are they studying a Virginia country ham aged for a year using little more than salt, smoke, and time? Are those truly the same food simply because both have been “processed”?Before we can answer what the science says about processed meat, we first have to understand how we got here.The story begins not in a laboratory, but in places like Madison County, where the old smokehouses have mostly disappeared, but the history they represent still has much to teach us.Just as old farms were built one fence post at a time, independent journalism is built one reader at a time. If you value this work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.For fun: The video below is of sylvan pig farming on Joel Salatin’s farm, which we filmed while at the Brownstone Polyface retreat last yearPolyface Retreat, August 2626

Summary: Part One: The Death of Virginia Ham


Cock Blocked

ROBERT W. MALONE, MD, MS · MALONE.NEWS“Cock Blocked”The phrase is suddenly everywhere among senior appointees, and what its spread reveals about who is really winning in Washington.The short version.A crude phrase, cock blocked, has become the house idiom of this administration’s senior appointees, and it is worth taking seriously. The word is evidence that the permanent bureaucracy is quietly winning. The populist agenda is being obstructed from below by career staff and, more consequentially, captured from above by the very industries it promised to confront. Three fights, over talc, glyphosate, and atrazine, show the machinery at work.Even the fact that women now use a phrase once reserved for locker rooms is a clue to how thoroughly this bureaucratic culture has permeated the administration.A phrase I keep hearingI keep hearing the same unfamiliar phrase. This is something new. New, at least, in my experience working at the fringes of Washington, DC, Beltway culture for decades.It comes up on secure phone calls and in television green rooms, over dinner in Washington, and in the hallway after a congressional hearing. It comes from people who run agencies, sub-agencies, and offices whose initials most Americans have never heard of. Serious people with real titles and real mandates. Yet the phrase they keep reaching for, over and over, to describe the experience of trying to do the jobs they were appointed to do, is that they have been “cock blocked.”The first time I heard it, I was a little shocked as I had literally never heard it before. Then, the next few times I heard it, I assumed I had misheard, or that it was simply a stray habit from someone with a locker-room streak. It was not. It has become the house idiom of a particular group of senior officials, and I do not remember that being true even a couple of years ago. So I started paying attention. Where did the term come from? Why has it suddenly spread through this crowd? And what does its spread tell us about the people using it?Where the word comes fromThe term is older than most people assume.It use is documented in Black American speech dating back to the early 1970s. A linguist named Edith Folb recorded it in 1972, in a study of the argot of Black teenagers in South Central Los Angeles that later grew into her 1980 book. In that first documented sense, it crudely meant what the words suggest: interfering with a man’s attempt to win over a woman, even when the person doing the interfering had no interest in her himself.From there, it traveled the way a great deal of American slang travels. It moved through popular music, up through hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, out into ordinary college-age and male conversation, and by the 2000s into sitcoms, movies, and endless comedy podcasts. Somewhere along that road, it did what coarse slang almost always does with time. It got tamer.The sexual meaning drained out of it, and it became a general word for being deliberately and pettily obstructed by someone who had no business getting involved. By the 2010s, a person could say they had been cock blocked out of a parking space, and nobody blinked (except maybe me). The metaphor was dead, in the same way that “screwed” and “sucks” are dead metaphors. Technically vulgar. In practice, they are part of the furniture.Why they are saying it nowSo the term is not new. Neither is its use to describe obstruction at work. What is new is this particular group of people, the nation’s conservative political appointees, saying it out loud with government badges hanging around their necks. Words like this do not spread through a group without a reason.The simplest explanation is generational. The people now filling many senior appointed positions are mostly in their forties and fifties. The slang of their youth was the slang of the 1990s and early 2000s, when this phrase was everywhere among young men. They are not inventing a new vocabulary. They have simply stopped leaving that kind of language at the office door.The fact that they have stopped bothering is itself worth noticing. Coarse speech inside a formal institution is rarely an accident. It is a signal. Both the Make America Great Again and Make America Healthy Again movements define themselves in opposition to what they see as the polished, credentialed, evasive language of the permanent government. That is the language of “concerns were raised” and “at this time we are unable to,” the language of people whose real talent is making sure that nothing happens and that no one can be blamed when it doesn’t.The speed with which it spread is not especially mysterious. This is a group that communicates very differently from previous generations of political appointees. Ideas are traded on podcasts, on X, and in private, encrypted group chats. One person close to a Cabinet secretary uses a phrase during a popular interview, it gets a laugh because everyone immediately recognizes the experience, and within weeks it has become part of the vocabulary of an entire circle of appointees. Slang spreads among powerful adults much the way it spreads among teenagers, through status, repetition, and the desire to belong. The only real difference today is that the process takes days instead of years.Talking like a construction crew instead of a briefing memo is a way of saying, “I am not one of them.” The vulgarity becomes a loyalty badge. The spoken equivalent of refusing to wear the tie. Or perhaps more accurately, refusing to become DC.The most revealing thing, though, is the particular vulgarity they chose, because the phrase carries an argument inside it. To say you were blocked means only that you were stopped. To say you were “cock blocked” means you were stopped by someone who deliberately inserted themselves for reasons of their own, not because they believed in what they were doing, but because they did not want you to succeed. It is also a phrase rooted in male competition. It describes a rival who steps in out of turf, jealousy, or spite rather than principle. Testosterone is implied. That is a remarkably specific accusation.And it lines up with how these officials describe the machinery around them. They point to the career staff they inherited, the government lawyers, the mandatory rulemaking process, the court injunctions, the inspectors general, and the endless procedural hurdles that are Washington’s natural state.They do not experience these as honest checks on executive power. They experience them as bad-faith interference by people whose real objective is tribal and aimed at protecting their own territory. The slang compresses that grievance into two words. When an entire group independently settles on the same vivid phrase to describe its daily experience, it is usually telling you something real.Why it matters that women say itThe most revealing detail is who is actually saying it. The phrase is, at its root, unmistakably male. It began as a rivalry between two men over a woman, and it is built around a piece of male anatomy. You would be hard pressed to invent a phrase with more masculine origins. Yet many of the people I hear using it are women, often the agency head herself describing how she was blocked.That is powerful evidence that the metaphor is no longer merely softened. It is dead. When a woman says she was “cock blocked” out of a policy victory, neither she nor anyone listening pauses to picture the phrase’s original meaning. The image has disappeared. The words survive, but the metaphor beneath them no longer does. That is what linguists mean by a dead metaphor. The phrase has become shorthand for deliberate obstruction, stripped almost entirely of its original sexual meaning.There is something else going on as well. When a woman in a senior government post reaches for this particular phrase, she is doing what her male colleagues are doing. She is signaling that she belongs with the builders rather than the bureaucrats, with the people trying to get something done rather than the people explaining why it cannot be done. The profanity is part of that signal.But there is another layer. Women in senior positions have traditionally been expected to speak more carefully than the men around them. Reaching for one of the crudest phrases in the language rejects that expectation outright. It says, “I am one of the team. I am not here to sound like Washington.” Whether consciously or not, the phrase is doing two jobs at once. It rejects the culture of the permanent bureaucracy and the unwritten rules about how a woman in power is supposed to sound.What it is really telling usListen closely to what these people are actually saying when they use this phrase. They are saying they believe they are being sabotaged from inside their own agencies. Not merely slowed by honest disagreement. Deliberately obstructed by the part of the government that was there before they arrived and expects to be there long after they are gone.That belief did not come from nowhere.Consider the situation these appointees walked into. Over the past year, the cost-cutting effort known as DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, eliminated thousands of federal jobs in the name of shrinking the bureaucracy. But reductions in force rarely remove the most deeply entrenched employees. They remove the easiest positions to eliminate. The people who survive are, almost by definition, the people best at surviving reorganizations. They are the most protected, the most senior, and often the most experienced at outlasting whoever happens to occupy the corner office. The remaining bureaucracy is not less influential. It is certainly older, more experienced, and more confident in its own permanence.Now add the second piece. Since the first day of this administration, hiring restrictions have sharply limited the ability of political appointees to bring in new staff. An agency head who concludes that career employees are slow-walking an initiative cannot simply replace them with people who share the administration’s priorities.The administration’s answer has been to revive Schedule F, or its successor, reclassifying thousands of career positions so they can be removed more easily. Whether that effort ultimately succeeds remains tied up in legal and administrative challenges. For most appointees, on most days, the people they believe are obstructing them are still sitting in the next office.So an appointee arrives with a mandate delivered by an election, sits down behind the desk, and discovers that the workforce was assembled by previous administrations, cannot easily be removed, and cannot quickly be replaced. They hold the title. They do not necessarily command the institution.Available research suggests that by early 2020, only about one-quarter to one-third of career federal employees identified as Republicans.  Then, Biden’s vaccine mandate almost certainly removed some of the  most ideologically conservative Federal employees, although no comprehensive accounting has ever been published. Party registration is not the same thing as institutional behavior, but it does suggest that many career employees may not share the political priorities of the administration they are now expected to implement.My inference is straightforward. The fact that this one crude phrase has spread so quickly through this community is not a trivial curiosity. Nor is it simply a joke. Shared language develops because it captures a shared experience. Groups do not independently adopt the same vivid expression unless it describes something many of them believe they are living through. When senior appointees in different departments, many of whom rarely speak with one another, reach for the same phrase to describe their week, that tells us something.Whether their diagnosis is entirely correct is a separate question. But their perception is unmistakable. They believe the permanent bureaucracy is beating them.If that perception reflects reality, then the career civil service, the administrative state, the Blob, or the deep state, choose your preferred label, is not losing this contest. Quietly and largely out of public view, it is prevailing through delay, procedure, and institutional inertia. The officials sent to carry out the administration’s agenda can feel it happening. The fact that so many have independently settled on the same crude phrase to describe that experience is, in itself, evidence that they see the problem as systemic rather than personal.Three fights that reveal the systemThe spread of this phrase is another clue. By itself, it means very little. But follow the recent fights over talc, glyphosate, and atrazine, and something larger comes into view. The problem is not merely bureaucratic obstruction. It is a system in which career institutions and the industries they regulate have become so intertwined that slowing change has become their shared interest.The talc ruleTake the case that investigative journalist Katherine Eban laid out inRolling Stonethis summer. For years, the Food and Drug Administration had a proposed rule that would have required standardized testing of talc, the mineral used in baby powder, for asbestos, a known carcinogen linked to mesothelioma and ovarian cancer. Late last year, the proposal was quietly withdrawn.According to Eban's reporting, neither Secretary Kennedy nor the FDA office that actually regulates talc appeared to know the rule had been pulled. More than that, no one has publicly identified who ordered it or why it was timed as it was. Johnson & Johnson, however, appeared to know exactly what had happened. The withdrawal appeared on the FDA's website a little more than three hours before one of the company's lawyers produced it in a California courtroom, where he used it to undermine the testimony of an expert witness for the plaintiff. The notice was not posted for the public to see until three days later. The jury sided with the company.This is roughly what being “cock blocked” looks like from the outside. Except the phrase does not quite capture it, because no one simply blocked anything. Someone inside the government reached for a lever at precisely the right moment, on behalf of a regulated company, and did so without the knowledge of the political leadership that was supposedly in charge. That is more than obstruction. It is a glimpse of where power actually resides.GlyphosateThe same pattern appears with glyphosate, the most heavily used herbicide in the United States. American agriculture applies well over 250 million pounds of glyphosate each year, making it a pillar of modern row-crop farming.Kennedy spent years as a lawyer suing the manufacturer over claims that the product causes cancer. Once in office, however, he found himself publicly supporting a presidential initiative to expand domestic production of critical agricultural chemicals. His explanation was pragmatic. “An immediate ban would collapse our food system.” The country, he argued, had become too dependent on these chemicals to remove them overnight.When members of Congress pressed him about the administration’s position on glyphosate and its broader defense of agricultural chemicals, his answer was simple. It was not his agency. He was right, and that is precisely the problem.The authority over pesticide registration and regulation belongs to the Environmental Protection Agency, not to the Department of Health and Human Services. The officials responsible for those decisions operate under different legal authorities, with a different mission and, in many cases, professional backgrounds closely tied to the industries they regulate. The man appointed to lead the administration’s health agenda has no authority over the chemical that he had spent years criticizing. The people who held that authority answered to an entirely different chain of command.That arrangement does more than divide authority. It compels compromise. Before he ever had the opportunity to change policy, Kennedy found himself publicly defending the very system he had spent years attacking. That is how institutional power works. It does not always defeat reformers by saying no. Sometimes it requires them to explain why the status quo must continue.That is more than a bureaucratic quirk. It is another example of how electoral mandates can be fragmented, diluted, and ultimately neutralized by the way Washington distributes power.The man appointed to lead the administration's health agenda had no authority over the chemical he had spent years fighting. The people who hold that authority had spent much of their careers defending its continued use. In the end, Kennedy found himself publicly explaining why the system he had campaigned against could not yet be changed. If you want to understand what these appointees mean when they say they have been "cock blocked," this is what it looks like in practice.AtrazineAtrazine is the clearest case of all, and it is not a story about career civil servants. Atrazine is a weedkiller that disrupts the endocrine system, contaminates the drinking water of tens of millions of Americans, and is banned in more than sixty countries.The administration’s own MAHA Commission named it, alongside glyphosate, as a target in its first report last spring. By the time the follow-up action plan was published, every proposed action on pesticides had disappeared. The account of how that happened is not subtle.The deeper problemA sustained lobbying campaign by chemical manufacturers, major commodity groups, their allies in Congress, and others with a stake in preserving the status quo pushed the commission into retreat. What survived was not a plan to reduce exposure, but a recommendation that the EPA and the agricultural industry work together to reassure the public that the existing safety reviews can be trusted.The personnel complete the story. A former lobbyist for the soybean growers was installed as the EPA’s deputy administrator for pesticides, and within a month the agency moved to reapprove a controversial pesticide he had previously been paid to promote. Two veterans of the chemical industry’s principal trade association returned to oversee the offices responsible for judging chemical safety. No hidden saboteur was required. The movement’s own commission abandoned its stated objectives, and the officials shaping the outcome came from the very industries the movement had promised to confront.On a personal note, I confronted EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin almost a month ago at a private MAHA event in Washington and asked him when the agency would finally take up the issue of atrazine. He told one of his staff to take my contact information and said he would get back to me. I am not holding my breath. Nor do I expect to be invited back to the next MAHA meeting. That is often the price of bringing uncomfortable truths to people in power. Access has a way of disappearing.Many writers on the right believe Substack’s algorithms do not give conservative voices the same organic reach that others enjoy. Whether that is entirely true or only partly true, one fact is beyond dispute: the most reliable way for an independent publication to grow is still person to person.So if this article made you think, please share it. Cross-post it. Email it to a friend. Post it on X. Start a conversation around your dinner table.ShareThe legacy media has a distribution network. We have readers. And, in the end, readers talking to readers have always been more powerful than any algorithm.A reality checkPut the three cases side by side and two different stories emerge. The first is obstruction from below: career staff, agency lawyers, and institutional procedure slowing, redirecting, burying, and simply outlasting political appointees. That is the frustration these officials describe, and the frustration they have compressed into one crude phrase.The second story is more important. Because what is happening iscapture from above.The interests a reform movement sets out to challenge have spent decades building deep benches of lawyers, scientists, regulators, lobbyists, and former officials. They know the statutes. They know the procedures. More importantly, they know where the levers are because many of them helped install the levers in the first place.A movement that wins an election arrives with a mandate, but not with a government. It inherits a government. What it rarely possesses is several hundred experienced people who share its goals and know how to run the agencies. Those empty chairs have to be filled somehow. Too often they are filled from the only bench deep enough to supply them, the very interests the movement promised to confront.Cock blocking is the phrase my colleagues keep using to describe the friction they feel every day. But it does not describe the deeper process. That process is quieter, more durable, and ultimately more consequential because it arrives wearing the movement’s own colors.There are serious constraints to the arguments laid out above.First, there are genuine constraints on the system that must be accounted for. Kennedy’s explanation for glyphosate, that eliminating it overnight would reduce crop yields, increase food prices, and further burden farmers already squeezed by tariffs and fuel prices, is a genuine concern. The movement identified the problem long before it developed a practical transition plan. That failure to think beyond the slogan is itself part of the story, and probably a larger part than many supporters would care to admit.Second, some of what these appointees experience as sabotage is nothing more sinister than constitutional government functioning as designed. Congress, the courts, and independent or semi-independent agencies exist to slow executive power. Those are the checks and balances laid out by the Constitution.The movement has encountered genuine institutional resistance. It has also been outmatched in places by interests that have spent decades mastering the machinery of government. And in some cases, it has simply collided with the constitutional system every president eventually discovers is more constraining than it first appears.Winning Office, Losing ControlBeyond the Cock BlockThe gap between holding the office and holding real power is exactly what these officials are trying to describe. They have discovered that crossing the first threshold does not guarantee the second. They possess the title. They carry the mandate. But they do not always control the institution.Whether they can close that gap before their time runs out is an open question. For now, the permanent bureaucracy appears content to wait them out. Judging from the language these appointees have independently adopted, many of them have begun to suspect that the bureaucracy may be winning.Malone News is reader-supported. A paid subscription allows us to keep asking uncomfortable questions, follow the evidence wherever it leads, and write the stories that too many others choose to ignore. If that work matters to you, I hope you'll consider becoming a subscriber.SourcesOn the termEdith A. Folb,A Comparative Study of Urban Black Argot: Final Report(Los Angeles, 1972), p. 135. The earliest documented use of the verb, defining it as interfering with a man’s attempt to win over a woman even when the interferer has no interest in her himself. Cited as the first attestation by the Oxford English Dictionary.Edith A. Folb,Runnin’ Down Some Lines: The Language and Culture of Black Teenagers(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).“cock block, v.,” Green’s Dictionary of Slang.https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/oiklxrqOn the federal workforce“Trump Extends Hiring Freeze Until Fiscal Year 2026,” NARFE, July 15, 2025.https://www.narfe.org/blog/2025/07/15/trump-extends-hiring-freeze-until-fiscal-year-2026/“The Civil Service After One Year of Trump 2.0: Reducing the Size of Federal Service,” NARFE, March 5, 2026.https://www.narfe.org/advocacy/emerging-threats/the-civil-service-after-one-year-of-trump-2-0-reducing-the-size-of-federal-service/“Trump moves about 8,000 federal positions to Schedule Policy/Career,” Federal News Network, June 4, 2026.https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/06/trump-moves-about-8000-federal-positions-to-schedule-policy-career/“’Harder days ahead in 2026’: Good government group predicts increased political interference in the civil service,” Government Executive, January 2026.https://www.govexec.com/management/2026/01/harder-days-ahead-2026-good-government-group-predicts-increased-political-interference-civil-service-trumps-second-year/410771/On the broader MAHA agendaCecelia Smith-Schoenwalder, “Promises Made, (Some) Promises Kept: MAHA in the White House Turns 1,” U.S. News & World Report, January 20, 2026.https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2026-01-20/promises-made-some-promises-kept-maha-in-the-white-house-turns-1Gray Delany, “The MAHA Base Is in Danger of Fracturing as Its Agenda Flails,” The Hill, December 23, 2025. Delany is a former Director of MAHA Implementation at HHS.https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5653262-the-maha-base-is-in-danger-of-fracturing-as-its-agenda-flails/“How RFK Jr.’s MAHA Agenda Keeps Hitting Roadblocks,” CNN Politics, April 1, 2026.https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/01/politics/rfk-jr-maha-agenda-casey-meansOn the talc rule withdrawalKatherine Eban, “Are MAGA and MAHA Heading for Divorce?,” Rolling Stone, 2026.https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/maha-maga-alliance-fracture-robert-kennedy-jr-1235582070/On glyphosate“The MAHA Movement Is Mad About the Weedkiller Glyphosate and Trump’s EPA,” NPR, April 28, 2026.https://www.npr.org/2026/04/28/nx-s1-5801645/maha-epa-pesticide-glyphosate-trump“Trump Pushes for Greater Production of Controversial Herbicide Glyphosate,” Food Safety Magazine, February 2026.https://www.food-safety.com/articles/11167-trump-pushes-for-greater-production-of-controversial-herbicide-glyphosateCarey Gillam, “Trump Enrages MAHA With Order Granting ‘Immunity’ to Glyphosate Pesticide Production,” The New Lede, February 19, 2026.https://www.thenewlede.org/2026/02/trump-enrages-maha/“MAHA Pushes Glyphosate Ban as EPA Nears New Safety Review,” The Daily Signal, July 1, 2026.https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/07/01/glyphosate-ban-epa-safety-review/On atrazine and the MAHA Commission“MAHA Commission Succumbs to Pesticide Industry Pressure,” Center for Biological Diversity, August 15, 2025.https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/maha-commission-succumbs-to-pesticide-industry-pressure-2025-08-15/

Summary: A phrase suddenly everywhere among senior government appointees, and what its spread reveals about who is really winning in Washington.