Cyclospora is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Audio VersionEvery summer, it seems to happen again. Another foodborne outbreak. Another investigation. Another recall. And, inevitably, another round of fearporn.This year it is Cyclospora, a microscopic parasite that has sickened thousands of Americans. We now know the source of at least one major cluster. Federal investigators traced a five-state outbreak to shredded iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico, supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico, and served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. Taco Bell was the point of sale, but the contamination entered the system farther upstream, somewhere along a supply chain that stretched from a Mexican farm through a major distributor and into hundreds of American restaurants. Other Cyclospora illnesses reported across the country may have different sources and remain under investigation.The problem is no longer a single contaminated restaurant or grocery store. Taylor Farms supplies hundreds or thousands of food-service locations through national distributors like Sysco. When contamination enters that system, it can travel farther than the produce itself, reaching hospitals, schools, restaurants, and grocery stores across multiple states before anyone realizes there is a problem.Cyclospora cayetanensis is not a bacterium like E. coli or Salmonella. It is a single-celled protozoan parasite spread through human fecal contamination. Freshly shed oocysts are not immediately infectious. They must mature in the environment for days or weeks before they can infect another person. That makes direct person-to-person transmission uncommon and generally occurs before the produce reaches the consumer.Cyclospora is also difficult to remove from delicate produce. Ordinary washing may reduce surface contamination, but it cannot reliably eliminate the parasite. Standard chlorination is also less effective against Cyclospora than it is against many bacteria. Once the parasite is lodged in the folds and crevices of lettuce or other leafy greens, there is only so much a consumer can do.But there is a larger story here, and it is one that few people seem interested in asking.In the 1970s, Americans traveling in Mexico were routinely warned not to eat raw salads or leafy vegetables. The advice was simple: drink bottled water, peel your fruit, and avoid uncooked produce that might have been irrigated, washed, or handled with contaminated water. No one considered this particularly controversial. It was ordinary travel advice based on the known risk of fecal contamination and gastrointestinal illness.Today, Americans increasingly eat Mexican-grown vegetables without leaving home or even thinking about it. That is especially true during the winter, when supermarkets remain stocked with cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, and other fresh produce grown far to the south. The United States now imports roughly half of its fresh fruit and about one-fifth of its fresh vegetables, with Mexico serving as the dominant foreign supplier for many categories.NAFTA accelerated the integration of imported foods from South America, particularly Mexico, into the North American food supply. Seasonal boundaries became less visible. We all now expect strawberries in January, tomatoes in February, and salad greens every day of the year. American growers faced competition from regions with lower labor costs, different regulatory systems, different water infrastructure, and growing conditions that allowed production when much of the United States was frozen.After NAFTA, the number of reported produce-associated outbreaks increased dramatically. CDC researchers identified 606 outbreaks associated with fresh leafy vegetables or leafy-based salads between 1973 and 2012. From 1973 through 1997, the average was about four reported outbreaks per year. From 1998 through 2012, it rose to more than thirty-three per year. That is an 8-fold difference from pre-NAFTA to after-NAFTA.Since 2012, the pattern has become even more striking. Instead of a steady increase in the number of outbreaks, the United States has experienced a series of large, multistate outbreaks involving the same commodity over and over again: leafy greens.Although only a few thousand illnesses each year are recognized as part of documented produce outbreaks, epidemiologists estimate the true burden is vastly larger.One recent analysisconcluded that leafy greens alone are responsiblefor as many as 2,307,558 illnesses annually in the United States. The economic cost of these illnesses is estimated to be up to $5.278 billion.”Thus, making them one of the single largest sources of foodborne disease.The recurrence has been serious enough that FDA developed a dedicated Leafy Greens STEC Action Plan, and the CDC, FDA, and USDA now estimate that vegetable row crops, primarily leafy greens, account for nearly 68 percent of all foodborneE. coliO157 illnesses, far exceeding beef.How did this happen? Produce imports increased. Centralized processing expanded. Bagged salads became common. National distribution systems allowed one contaminated field, packing house, or processing line to expose consumers across many states. Yet remarkably little work has been done to determine whether increasing dependence on imported produce has itself changed the epidemiology of foodborne illness.Produces accounts for the largest share of imported-food outbreaks, with foods such as cilantro, basil, peppers, cucumbers, papayas, berries, and leafy vegetables appearing repeatedly. Mexico and other Latin American countries were prominent sources in a number of these investigations.It is important to note that several of the most serious romaine outbreaks in recent years were traced to American growing regions in California and Arizona, often near large cattle operations or other potential sources of environmental contamination. American agriculture has its own sanitation problems, and a domestic label is also no guarantee of safety.There is another important complication. Most of the historical leafy-green outbreaks were not necessarily traced to contaminated fields. Nearly three-quarters were associated with salads in which investigators could not identify the precise ingredient responsible. Many occurred in restaurants or catering facilities, and norovirus was frequently involved. In those cases, a sick food worker may have contaminated the salad during preparation.The more serious multi-state outbreaks tended to look different. They were more likely to involve E. coli or Salmonella and more likely to originate earlier in the production chain. Those were the events that produced a disproportionate share of hospitalizations and deaths.So, when public-health officials speak of a “leafy-green outbreak,” they may be combining two very different problems. One is a restaurant worker contaminating a bowl of salad. The other is fecally contaminated irrigation water reaching a nationally distributed crop. Those events belong in the same surveillance database, but they do not have the same cause, the same scale, or the same solution.The honest conclusion is that globalization is a huge part of this story, but no one has adequately measured how large that part is. We have dramatically increased the distance between the field and the fork. We mix crops from multiple farms, wash them in centralized facilities, package them in plastic, ship them across national borders, and expect them to remain crisp for a week or more before they reach the dinner table.Isn’t it time for an honest analysis of the downstream consequences of trade agreements, such as NAFTA?ShareA plea for all of us to do betterRobert and I rarely buy bagged salad anymore. Not because we are terrified of Cyclospora. The odds that any individual package will make us sick remain small. We stopped buying it because once you learn to grow greens, packaged salad simply stops making much sense.Homegrown greens taste better. They last longer because the food stays on the plant until harvest, and then it is harvested minutes before dinner rather than days or even weeks after processing. They cost pennies instead of dollars. There is no plastic container headed for the landfill, and we know exactly where they came from. We also know what was used to grow them, which, in our case, means no pesticides or herbicides, and the nitrogen comes from living soil instead of being made from natural gas. Our fertility comes from compost, cover crops, mulch, animal manures, and living soil rather than primarily from nitrogen manufactured from natural gas. Our practices feed the soil first, and the plants second.People tend to think gardening means waiting until July for the first tomato. In reality, greens are among the fastest and easiest foods to grow. With a little planning, they can be harvested during nearly every month of the year.The secret is to stop thinking about “the garden” as a single annual event and begin thinking in terms of succession planting. Instead of planting one large crop, sow a smaller amount every few weeks. Use raised beds, containers near the kitchen, or any sunny patch of ground. When cold weather arrives, move production into a simple hoop house, cold frame, unheated greenhouse, or sunny indoor space.Spring belongs to spinach, lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, Asian greens, and peas. These crops prefer cool weather and often grow more vigorously before summer heat arrives.Summer requires a different strategy. Traditional lettuce and spinach often bolt in the heat, but Swiss chard, New Zealand spinach, Malabar spinach, amaranth leaves, sweet potato leaves, and beet greens will continue producing. Many people harvest beets for their roots and throw away the tops, even though beet greens are tender, nutritious, and delicious. We harvest both.Autumn brings a second season for cool-weather crops. Spinach returns, kale becomes sweeter after cold nights, lettuce thrives again, and Asian greens flourish as temperatures fall. With a light cover, many of these crops will continue producing well past the first frost.Winter is where a little creativity pays off. Microgreens can be harvested on a kitchen counter in ten to fourteen days. Pea shoots grow quickly indoors. Sunflower shoots are packed with flavor. Broccoli sprouts are easy to grow and are among the most nutrient-dense greens available. Mung beans and alfalfa remain old standbys, although sprouts require careful sanitation because the same warm, humid conditions that promote germination can also promote bacterial growth.In our greenhouse, we continue harvesting herbs long after the outdoor garden has gone dormant. A greenhouse is wonderful, but it is not essential. A simple hoop system over a raised bed can protect greens from frost, wind, and heavy rain while extending the growing season by weeks or even months. The hoop system is what we use for our main greens - lettuce, spinach, and kale during the early winter months and early spring.Raised beds make the process easier. They warm more quickly in spring, drain well during heavy rains, and allow the gardener to build living soil over time. We add compost regularly, mulch generously, and plant cover crops whenever a bed will sit empty for more than a few weeks. We are still experimenting with cover crops; this year, daikon radishes and turnips will do dual duty as cover crops and also for their clay-busting potential. Healthy soil produces resilient plants, and resilient plants are not chemical inputs.One of the biggest surprises for new gardeners is how little space greens require. A single four-by-eight-foot raised bed can produce salads for weeks. Add another bed, a few containers, and some trays of microgreens indoors, and many families can stop buying packaged greens for much of the year.Our industrial food system has become more centralized, more dependent on imports, and less visible. Every additional field, truck, border crossing, washing facility, processing line, warehouse, and grocery shelf introduces another point where something can go wrong. Most of the time, the system works. Occasionally, it fails on a scale that would have been nearly impossible when food was grown and eaten locally.There is another reason we enjoy growing our own greens. Freshly harvested vegetables are living tissue. The moment they are cut, they begin consuming their own sugars and vitamins through respiration. Vitamin C begins to decline almost immediately, while flavor compounds and delicate antioxidants slowly disappear during washing, packaging, transportation, refrigeration, and storage. Commercial agriculture has done an extraordinary job of producing vegetables that survive a thousand-mile trip and then can sit in the vegetable aisle for another week or two. It has been less successful at producing vegetables that taste like they were picked ten minutes ago.Plant breeding has also changed our food. Over the past half-century, breeders have selected varieties that yield more, ship farther, bruise less, and remain attractive on grocery shelves. Those improvements have helped feed millions of people cheaply, but they have also been accompanied by measurable declines in several minerals and vitamins in many vegetables, a phenomenon known as “yield dilution.” Bigger plants do not necessarily contain more nutrition. They often contain more water. So, be careful with the cultivar when selecting your seeds or seedlings. Heirloom varieties are often best.Commercial agriculture often manages dirt. We try to grow soil. There is a difference. Healthy soil is alive. It is full of roots, bacteria, fungi, earthworms, insects, nematodes, protozoa, and countless other organisms that recycle nutrients, build organic matter, and feed plants in ways a bag of fertilizer never can. Much of modern agriculture replaces that biological complexity with applications of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Crops still grow, often spectacularly well, but over time, the soil itself becomes less biologically resilient.That is one of the hidden pleasures of growing food at home. We are not trying to maximize truckloads per acre. We harvest for flavor, freshness, and nutrition. Our lettuce never has to survive a week in a refrigerated trailer. It only has to make it from the garden to the dinner table.Every head of lettuce you grow yourself is one less that depends on a supply chain you cannot see and cannot control. Growing greens is one of the easiest places to begin. The investment is small, the learning curve is gentle, and the reward begins in a matter of weeks.There is something deeply satisfying about walking outside with a bowl, cutting enough greens for dinner, and knowing that your salad never crossed a border, entered a processing plant, or was exposed to someone defecating in a field.That is food security on a very human scale.JGM/RWMIf you found this essay valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.The headlines tell us what happened. Our goal is to dig into why it happened, what the data actually show, and what questions no one else seems to be asking. That takes time. It means reading the scientific literature, government reports, regulatory filings, and historical records so you don’t have to.Your support makes that work possible. It also allows us to remain independent, free to follow the evidence wherever it leads, whether it confirms conventional wisdom or challenges it.Subscribe nowIf you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. You make this work possible. If you’re not, We hope you’ll consider joining us. Together, we’re building a community that values curiosity, critical thinking, and the freedom to have honest conversations about the issues that affect our health, our food, and our future.

Summary: Yet, the salad bar could be just outside your back door


Friday Funnies: Burn it All Down Baby!

For those not paying attention, CBS has now“fact checked” several of Trump's claims from last night’s speech - as false. They have announced this before the newly declassified documents he cited have been fully released and independently evaluated.Funny how that works…I'm old enough to remember the collective meltdown when Congress renamed Washington National Airport after Ronald Reagan. The mainstream media acted as if civilization itself were ending.To this day, plenty of people in DC refuse to call it Reagan National. It’s still just “National” or “DCA.” Because, well... we all know how “evil” Reagan was <insert eye roll here>.So now United has decided to join the culture wars?Ironically, we fly United almost exclusively because our home airport, Dulles (yes, named afterthoseDulles brothers), is basically a United hub.My response?F/U, United.Maybe it’s time to go out of my way to fly someone else for a while.So, China cracks down on AI companions, banning features that foster emotional dependence, not allowing children to have AI companions, and forcing major tech firms to disable many virtual companion services.So, unless we do what China just did and regulate AI companions - this will be the future of our youth…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.JGM


Sunday Strip: Great Balls of Fire!

(But according to my Aunt Renee, the bingo hall was a lot more fun.)Humor isn't meant to comfort people. It's meant to reveal truth, and truth has always offended someone.The video below is disturbing -The man was the unfortunate object onto which an already highly aroused rutting bull directed its aggression. Had another person, cyclist, vehicle, or even another bison occupied that same place at that moment, they might well have become the target instead.That is one reason wildlife biologists often say that rutting bison are among the most unpredictable large mammals in North America. During the breeding season, their behavior can shift from apparently placid to explosively aggressive with remarkably little obvious provocation.Freedom - Getting serious now.The meme coin above may offend some people because it jokes about someone being seriously injured. But to me, that image perfectly captures what freedom means.Freedom means accepting responsibility for taking chances. It means choosing to be in places where the unexpected can happen. It means accepting that, yes, you might get seriously hurt. Sometimes by animals that have no concept of what it means not to be free.Robert and I live on a farm with heavy equipment, large animals, and countless opportunities to get hurt. And we have. More than once, we’ve found ourselves in situations where the stakes were very real.Just on Friday, we bred a 1,200-pound mare to Jade. The mare threw an absolute anxiety tantrum after being separated from her filly for all of five minutes. She repeatedly lashed out at the gate where Jade was standing. Had I not stepped aside after seeing her ears pin back, I could have been seriously injured. Robert was just as exposed while trying to steady the mare as I opened the gate. This mare is one of our nicest, kindest mares. But in that moment, all hell broke loose.Was it fun? No. Was it scary? Absolutely. But it was also seemed the safest way to make sure the filly wasn’t hurt. Everything worked out, but those are the kinds of decisions we make year after year because that’s what comes with running a breeding farm. When you choose to work with large animals, you also choose to accept the risks that come with them.“There are two kinds of bulls: the ones that have tried to kill you, and the ones that haven’t had the chance yet.”By the way, the humble cow is closely related to the bison.And dairy bulls are widely considered among the most dangerous domestic animals in the world.So, people choose to do all sorts of things that may not be in their best interests, but that is what freedom brings - the risk and the responsibility to make our own choices.On the flip side of the coin, the homestead and the horses keep us fit.  We look and feel years younger than we are.Life is a balancing act - and a trade-off.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share it by email, social media, crossposting, or notes!ShareEvery Sunday, I gather the funniest things I stumbled across during the week. Some are clever. Some are absurd. Some are politically incorrect. More than a few are guaranteed to offend somebody.That’s the point.As the saying goes,if no one is ever offended, you’re probably not telling jokes. You’re just seeking consensus.Humor has always been one of the safest ways to challenge orthodoxy, puncture arrogance, and remind us not to take ourselves quite so seriously. If every joke has to pass through a committee to ensure no one is uncomfortable, it stops being humor and starts being public relations.So, if you enjoy a weekly dose of memes, videos, satire, and the occasional joke that makes polite society clutch its pearls, consider becoming a paid subscriber.Your subscription doesn’t just support our writing. It keeps this community independent, keeps the lights on, and gives me an excuse to spend part of every Sunday hunting down the funniest content on the internet so you don’t have to.Subscribe nowLife is serious enough. Once a week, let’s laugh at it together.Forget playing it cool, find someone who’s genuinely obsessed with you in the healthiest way possible. Someone who can’t go hours without talking to you. Who misses you after being apart for a few hours. Who expresses love freely without making it feel like effort.Society shames clinginess like it’s toxic, but there’s a huge difference between codependency and someone who just genuinely loves being around you. A clingy partner isn’t checking your phone or controlling your life, they’re the person who texts you random I love yous throughout the day. Who wants to spend quality time together because they actually enjoy your presence.Who shows affection naturally without you begging for it. Who makes loving you look easy because for them, it is. Meanwhile, emotionally unavailable people treat basic affection like a chore. You have to ask for attention. Beg for texts back. Request quality time like you’re scheduling a business meeting.They make you feel needy for wanting what should be automatic in a relationship. Life’s genuinely too short for that. Find someone whose love language is showing you constantly, consistently, enthusiastically that you matter. That’s not clingy, that’s partnership.-Author unknownHomesteading for Health.There are those who talk the talk, and those who walk the walk.  Over 50 years together, still in love, and still frisky.  And, back in the day, they all said we were too young.  They were wrong. The above photos were from a photo shoot yesterday for an article inHomesteaders of America(due out in September), promoting our book.Homesteading for HealthJGM


MAHA Inc.: The Machine, the Figurehead, and the BaseThe view from inside Washington. Who actually runs the health department, and whether the movement’s founder can win back the people he has lost.Executive summaryMake America Healthy Again has become a corporation. A super PAC, three nonprofits, a trademark, and a holding company now carry the brand, built by the publisher Tony Lyons and the financier Mark Gorton, with the secretary’s son on the commercial board. Inside the health department, operational power has passed from Kennedy’s original circle to the cost-control wing that Mehmet Oz built at Medicare. Chris Klomp, Oz’s former deputy, runs daily operations and is now nominated as the department’s second in command. Kennedy keeps the brand and his signature health fights. He has lost the machinery, and he sits most of the way to a figurehead.His base has turned on him. Glyphosate, the food loophole, and the mRNA platform each ended with the movement’s demands unmet, because governing inside the MAGA coalition forced the compromises. That leaves a hard problem for a 2028 run he keeps denying. He cannot easily win back a base he alienated while serving, and every recovery path carries a cost. The anti-war lane is the most tempting and the most dangerous, because the version circulating in the movement rests on an unproven and antisemitic claim that a foreign lobby controls the president.Two findings cut against the loudest stories. A recent claim that Elon Musk funded the movement is overstated. The documented figure is three million dollars to a pro-Trump PAC, not the six million alleged, and not seed capital for the health agenda. Winning may also miss the point. Under super PAC law a presidential campaign pays its operators whether or not it succeeds, and the MAHA apparatus is already a candidacy held in escrow. This is the view from inside Washington. The movement reads it differently, and the capital has misjudged Kennedy before.Eighteen months in, Make America Healthy Again has changed shape twice. The movement hardened into a corporation. The department slipped from Kennedy’s own people toward the White House. A third problem now shadows both. The base that carried Kennedy feels betrayed on the issues it cares about most. That matters for a 2028 run he keeps denying, because a figurehead cannot lead an insurgency.This account comes from inside the Beltway. It rests on the Washington press and on the operatives who run these groups. That vantage reads org charts, donor filings, and personnel moves well, and grassroots faith badly. In the capital’s telling, Kennedy is a diminished official inside a machine. In much of the base’s telling, he is a fighter under siege. The documents favor the first reading. The base lives the second. Hold both in your mind as you read through this essay.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe apparatusTony Lyons built the machine. He founded Skyhorse Publishing, Kennedy’s book publisher for two decades. He and Mark Gorton seeded American Values 2024, the super PAC behind Kennedy’s presidential run, then rebranded it as MAHA PAC (Isenstadt 2025).Gorton co-founded Tower Research Capital in 1998, one of the oldest high-frequency trading firms, now spread across offices on four continents (Tower Research Capital 2025). In 2000 he created LimeWire, the peer-to-peer file-sharing program that at its 2007 peak sat on roughly a third of the world’s computers (Institutional Investor 2014). A federal court shut it down in 2010 and found Gorton personally liable for copyright infringement. He settled with the record labels for about one hundred five million dollars (SlashGear 2023). Wall Street trading and a shuttered file-sharing empire built the money now underwriting the movement.Four more entities grew around the PAC (Children’s Health Defense 2025). MAHA Action runs advocacy and now holds the trademark. Policy work sits with the MAHA Institute. Donations to the MAHA Center are tax deductible. The commercial arm is MAHA Holdings.MAHA Holdings sits closest to the family, and it is the least transparent of the five. Kennedy’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Finn Kennedy, holds a board seat and helped organize the movement’s marquee industry summit (E&E News 2025). He also invests at the venture firm 8VC, which backs health, manufacturing, and defense companies (E&E News 2025). He put the entity’s purpose in plain commercial terms. It exists to accelerate private industry adoption of the MAHA agenda (MAHA Action 2025). That agenda is the one his father sets as secretary. The entity keeps no public website and discloses neither its ownership nor its revenue model (Children’s Health Defense 2025; Consumer Federation of America 2025).The brand carries a paid history. Kennedy earned one hundred thousand dollars in licensing fees from the MAHA marks, then transferred the trademark to a Wyoming LLC managed by Del Bigtree for no compensation (Associated Press 2025; Washington Post 2025). The incentives run the way public-choice economics predicts. Concentrated benefits reach those who hold the brand and sell the products. The costs disperse across a movement that supplies the moral energy for free.The Musk claimSasha Latypova put the funding question on the table in July (Latypova 2026). She read the MAHA Alliance filings and concluded that six million dollars of the roughly eight million raised came from one donor, Elon Musk. From there she argued that Musk underwrote the movement and owns Kennedy. Part of this checks out. The headline number does not.Musk did fund MAHA Alliance. The documented figure is three million dollars, given on October 22, 2024, through the Elon Musk Revocable Trust. CNN, NBC, CBS, and The Hill report the same three million, each citing the same FEC filings (CNN 2024; NBC News 2024; CBS News 2024; The Hill 2024). Against the committee’s cycle total near eight million, that was the largest single donation (OpenSecrets 2024). It was about a third of the money, not three quarters.Six million runs to roughly double the record. No outlet and no FEC summary supports it, and the period filings fit one three-million contribution rather than two (FEC 2024). The likely source of the larger figure is a separate sum she cites, the two point one million that American Values 2024 sent to MAHA Alliance. That money came from Timothy Mellon and Nicole Shanahan, not from Musk. Adding it to Musk’s total does not make it his. One detail also fails to line up. She places the Musk trust in Dallas. The trust named in the reporting sits in Austin (NBC News 2024).The larger error is what the money was for. MAHA Alliance was not the seed capital of Kennedy’s movement. It was a single-candidate super PAC supporting Trump, registered on September 5, 2024, after Kennedy left the race and endorsed him (OpenSecrets 2024). It ran ads urging Kennedy’s voters to choose Trump in the final stretch (CNN 2024). Musk’s three million was one line in his pro-Trump spending that year, which approached three hundred million dollars (CBS News 2024). This was turnout money wearing a MAHA label. It did not build MAHA Action, the MAHA Institute, or MAHA Holdings, and it did not fund the health agenda.So the jump from a campaign check to ownership does not hold. A single three-million donation, a third of a small committee that spent on Trump ads and conferences, does not buy a man or a movement. The filings show a contribution and nothing larger.Latypova’s underlying work is not worthless. Bigtree signed the filings as principal officer. His media firm, Big Truth Inc., collected about three hundred ten thousand dollars, which matches earlier reporting (Associated Press 2025). Mellon’s twenty-five million to American Values 2024 is real (Washington Post 2024). The itemized spending she flags is on the record. Her strongest point survives the correction. A small and cash-hungry movement is cheap to influence, which is a public-choice truth. The three-million check makes that case on its own. Follow the money to the filing, not to the story you already believe.The old guardBefore February, two people ran the health department in Kennedy’s name. Stefanie Spear controlled the door. She had served Kennedy for twenty years and run communications on his campaign, and she functioned as the gatekeeper to the secretary (World Tribune 2025). Nothing reached him without passing her. Matt Buckham ran the machinery. As chief of staff he controlled personnel and the flow of appointees into the building.Critics inside the movement called this a cage. Gray Delany, the former director of MAHA implementation, says Spear and Buckham sealed Kennedy off from his own allies and staffed the department with compliant hands (World Tribune 2025). Their defenders called it discipline. Either way, the pair held the immediate office. For a year the chain of command ran through them, not through the career bureaucracy and not through the White House.The Oz axisThat arrangement ended when the White House found a better instrument. Mehmet Oz runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the largest agency inside HHS, with a budget above two trillion dollars (CMS 2025). Chris Klomp served as his deputy, directing the Center for Medicare and drawing up the drug-pricing deals that Trump prizes. Oz called him a generational talent (Deseret News 2026). Trump called him a potential star.In February the White House lifted Klomp out of CMS and set him over the whole department as chief counselor (Politico 2026). In June it nominated him deputy secretary, the formal second in command. Trump, Kennedy, and Oz announced the choice together (Fox News 2026). The cost-control wing that Oz built at CMS now occupies the top of Kennedy’s department. The reshuffle pushed the movement wing down. Buckham became a senior counselor. Spear kept her title, lost her reach, and remains at the building in a smaller role (HHS 2026; Traylor 2026).Who governs nowThe arrangement raises a hard question about Kennedy himself. On the public record, operational authority has moved to Klomp. Trump says Klomp oversees day-to-day operations (CNN 2026). Klomp ran the searches that produced the nominees for the CDC, the surgeon general, and the FDA (CNN 2026). The White House installed him to keep closer tabs on Kennedy and to align the department with its own aims (Politico 2026).Kennedy has not been emptied out. He keeps the bully pulpit and the brand, and he still drives his signature moves. He cancelled the BARDA mRNA contracts and remade the vaccine advisory committee. The campaign against synthetic food dyes was his. These are real exercises of a secretary’s power, and they belong to him.The division is now visible from the capital. Kennedy owns the symbolism and the culture-war health fights. Klomp owns operations, personnel, and the agenda the White House can sell in November. By the capital’s reckoning, a secretary who owns the message but not the machinery is most of the way to a figurehead. Kennedy is not all the way there. He is close.The revoltThe base sees the drift and resents it. The break came over glyphosate. Kennedy spent years calling the weedkiller a driver of chronic disease, and he won a large verdict against its maker (Slate 2026). In February Trump signed an order shielding glyphosate producers from lawsuits and framing the chemical as a matter of national defense. Kennedy stayed quiet, then defended the order (The Hill 2026). MAHA moms revolted. One Turning Point host said women were leaving the party over it (Slate 2026).The losses stacked from there. The White House sided with farm lobbyists against pesticide limits in the second MAHA Commission report (New York Times 2026). Lobbyists spent millions to keep the food-safety loophole that Kennedy pledged to close (Daily Beast 2026). The Supreme Court threw out the old Roundup verdict. Each defeat landed on the people who trusted Kennedy to win these exact fights.The sharpest break is over vaccines. In June a group of medical-freedom activists led by Mary Talley Bowden, with Naomi Wolf and others, sent Kennedy an open letter accusing him of a bait and switch on the mRNA platform (Bowden 2026). They want the shots pulled from the market and the PREP Act repealed. They warned that MAHA voters can walk away. Mike Adams and Sayer Ji, longtime allies, turned on Kennedy over a single pro-MMR statement. To its hardest core, the movement’s founder now looks like a man who compromised on the founding cause.The recovery problemSet the denials aside and assume a run (Kennedy 2025; KFF Health News 2026). Kennedy would face a base he alienated while governing. The disaffection is structural, not a matter of messaging. Governing inside the MAGA coalition forced the compromises that enraged the movement. Big Ag won the pesticide fight and Big Food kept its loophole. The White House took the department. A candidate cannot campaign against the outcomes his own administration produced without indicting himself.Deliver a trophyOne path runs through a signature win before 2028. The mRNA contract cancellations were a down payment. A reversal on childhood mRNA guidance, or a closed food loophole, would give Kennedy a concrete victory to point at. The obstacle sits above him. Klomp and the White House control the timing, and neither wants a vaccine fight before the midterms.Blame the captorsA second path casts Kennedy as the thwarted reformer. This is his native register. Kennedy and Spear have long framed him as a lone man of courage besieged by a corrupt machine, and they will keep doing so. When the White House pressed him last summer, he called it a swamp panic and a smear campaign, and vowed that nothing would stop him (Kennedy 2025). So he tells the base that Big Pharma, Big Ag, and the swamp blocked him from the inside. The story has the advantage of being partly true. It carries one complication. The people who blocked him, in the base’s own telling, were Spear and Buckham and the White House he chose to serve. He cannot indict his captivity without admitting he accepted it.The anti-war laneThat complication has an exit, and current events supply it. In 2026 the United States and Israel went to war with Iran, a conflict that split the coalition and reopened the oldest fault line on the right (Britannica 2026). Thomas Massie, the last consistent anti-war Republican in the House, lost his primary in May to a Trump-backed challenger. It was the most expensive House primary on record, and pro-Israel groups spent more than fifteen million dollars to beat him (Al Jazeera 2026). Tucker Carlson turned the defeat into a thesis. A foreign lobby, he argued, hijacked America First and now runs the party (Carlson 2026).The thesis hands Kennedy a captor who is not his own staff. If outsiders captured the administration, then Kennedy is a fellow prisoner and not the warden. He can stay loyal to Trump, blame the hijackers, and reach for the anti-war base that the Iran war and the Massie purge left leaderless. That story scales to a larger stage.The lane is more dangerous than it looks. His own record is the plainest obstacle. In 2024 he called Israel a moral nation, defended its war in Gaza, and pledged it firm support, and the anti-war left attacked him for it (Times of Israel 2024). His campaign, with Spear running communications, declined public debates on the subject (Blumenthal 2023). A pivot to the anti-war banner would reverse his most consistent foreign-policy stance, and the purists remember.The framing carries its own danger. That pro-Israel groups spent heavily to beat Massie is documented fact (Al Jazeera 2026). That a foreign government controls the president is not. The leap from lobbying to secret control is unproven, and in its strong form it revives an old antisemitic libel. A man already labeled a conspiracy theorist cannot carry that cargo. His enemies would brand him at once, and the brand would hold.He also cannot run from where he sits. No one campaigns as the anti-war candidate while serving in the cabinet that runs the war. The money that ended Massie, more than thirty million dollars in a single House race, would turn on a sitting secretary with far more to lose. This lane runs through the exit, not the office. It is less a way to blame the captors than a reason to walk out.Walk outA third path is exit. Kennedy leaves HHS, sheds the compromises, and runs as the outsider again. This restores the insurgent posture the base rewards. It also forfeits the incumbency, the platform, and the drug-pricing wins that a general electorate likes. Lyons has said the plan is the opposite, to keep Kennedy at HHS into the next administration (Telegraph 2025). Exit burns that plan down.Buy the turnoutA fourth path leans on the machine. MAHA Inc. has money and a candidate pipeline, and it can paper over disaffection with organization. Money turns out soft supporters. It does not turn out the betrayed. The Bowden letter and the glyphosate revolt come from the true believers, the people a mailer cannot buy back.None of these paths is clean. The strongest combination pairs a trophy with a villain, a real win plus a machine to blame, told in the victim’s voice he already owns. That still requires the White House to let him win something before November, which it has no reason to do. The base problem and the figurehead problem are one problem. Kennedy lost the power to give the base what it wants at the moment he needs the base most.The campaign is the productThe recovery problem assumes the goal is winning. Super PAC law makes that goal optional (Malone and Glasspool Malone 2026). American campaign finance runs on an asymmetry. Outside money arrives without limit, and it leaves through consultants, media firms, vendors, and the candidate’s own entities. The vote at the end does not govern the flow. A campaign is a machine for turning donations into contracts.Defeat still leaves a durable asset. A run builds a donor list, a media brand, and a standing organization, and all three outlast the ballots. The return does not depend on the result. Hopeless campaigns in both parties have worked this way for years, the candidate’s name still raising money long after the race was lost. Losing is not failure when the campaign was the product.MAHA Inc. is that machine already assembled. The PAC, the nonprofits, the trademark, and the holding company are campaign infrastructure held in escrow. A sitting secretary cannot run, so the allies hold the pieces and wait. A 2028 bid would not build an apparatus. It would switch one on. The engine is finished, staffed, and idling.So the base problem changes shape. Recovering the base is the task if the aim is to win. If the aim is the campaign itself, a hollow base matters less. A tilting-at-windmills run still pays the consultants and licenses the brand, and it still enriches the circle around the candidate. That is the incentive the law builds. It rewards the attempt regardless of the odds. Whether Kennedy can win in 2028 is one question. Whether a run is worth launching is another, and the second does not wait on the first.A movement earns its authority from the consent of the people who animate it. MAHA rose on a promise to break captured institutions. Its founder now sits inside one, outranked by the men the White House chose, defending an order he once would have sued. The machine that bears his name keeps raising money and licensing the brand, and his own son sits on the board of its commercial arm. The people who supplied the moral force are drifting off. Kennedy built an apparatus to protect the mission and a coalition to carry it. He is losing command of both at once. He will narrate that loss as a siege, the lone reformer against the machine, because that story has always worked for him. The capital measures power in org charts and reads him as fading. The movement measures power in belief, and by that measure the story is not settled. Whether he can run on a movement he no longer controls is the question the denials are meant to postpone. The Beltway thinks it knows the answer. It has misjudged Kennedy (and the MAHA populist coalition) before.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ReferencesAl Jazeera. 2026. “Massie Race Breaks Spending Record as Pro-Israel Groups Target Trump Critic.” May 18.Associated Press. 2025. “How Leaders of the MAHA Movement Benefit From Anti-Science Advocacy and Promise Profits to Industry.” October 21.Blumenthal, Max. 2023. “RFK Jr. Staff Block Israel-Palestine Dialogue.” The Grayzone.Bowden, Mary Talley. 2026. “Open Letter to Secretary Kennedy on mRNA Vaccine Policy.” June 4.Britannica. 2026. “2026 Iran War.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.Carlson, Tucker. 2026. “The Israel Lobby Takes Out Thomas Massie and Kills MAGA.” The Tucker Carlson Show, May 20.CBS News. 2024. “Elon Musk Spends $277 Million to Back Trump and Republican Candidates.” December 8.Children’s Health Defense. 2025. “MAHA: A Who’s Who of Groups That Bear the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Slogan in Their Names.” The Defender, November 24.CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). 2025. “Dr. Mehmet Oz Shares Vision for CMS.” April 10.CNN. 2024. “Musk Spent at Least a Quarter-Billion Dollars to Help Elect Donald Trump, New Filings Show.” December 5.CNN. 2026. “Trump Nominates Chris Klomp as HHS Second in Command.” June 25.Consumer Federation of America. 2025. “What to Make of ‘MAHA-Con’?” November 19.Daily Beast, The. 2026. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA Agenda Starts to Unravel at FDA Over GRAS.” June 17.Deseret News. 2026. “Who Is Trump’s ‘Favorite Mormon’ Chris Klomp, Overseeing HHS?” March 24.E&E News. 2025. “JD Vance, RFK Jr. to Attend MAHA Summit.” Politico, November 12.FEC (Federal Election Commission). 2024. “MAHA Alliance, Committee C00888172: Filings and Financial Summary.”Fox News. 2026. “Trump Nominates Chris Klomp for HHS Deputy Secretary, Calls Him ‘a Potential Star.’” June 25.HHS (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). 2026. “Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Harms of Screen Use.” May 20.Institutional Investor. 2014. “The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Mark Gorton.”Isenstadt, Alex. 2025. “RFK Jr., Allies Rush to Rally the MAHA Movement for 2026.” Axios, August 24.KFF Health News. 2026. “Kennedy, Balancing MAHA and White House, Says He Won’t Run for President in 2028.” May 16.Kennedy, Robert F., Jr. 2025. Statement posted to X, August 15.Latypova, Sasha. 2026. “Who Owns Bobby? Review of MAHA Alliance Financials for 2024-2025.” Due Diligence and Art (Substack), July 17.MAHA Action. 2025. “The MAHA Summit.” mahaaction.com, November 12.Malone, Robert W., and Jill Glasspool Malone. 2026. “The Campaign Is the Product.” MALONE.NEWS (Substack).NBC News. 2024. “Elon Musk Spent a Quarter-Billion Dollars Electing Trump, Including Financing Mysterious ‘RBG PAC.’” December 5.New York Times, The. 2026. “Leaked Draft of Second MAHA Commission Report Declines to Restrict Pesticides.” Reported via secondary coverage, March.OpenSecrets. 2024. “PAC Profile: MAHA Alliance (C00888172).”Politico. 2026. “RFK Jr. Shakes Up Leadership Team.” February 12.SlashGear. 2023. “The History of LimeWire: How It Worked and What Happened to It.” July 25.Slate. 2026. “Trump Betrayed the MAHA Movement This Week. RFK Jr.’s Reaction Was Telling.” February 21.Telegraph, The. 2025. “RFK Jr. Should Have Second Term as Health Secretary, Say Allies.”The Hill. 2024. “Musk Spent at Least $250M to Help Elect Trump, Filings Show.” December 6.The Hill. 2026. “Kennedy Doubles Down on Defense of Trump Glyphosate Order Amid MAHA Backlash.” February 23.Times of Israel, The. 2024. “2024 Dark Horse RFK Jr. Questions Need for Gaza Truce, Defends Israeli Offensive.” March 21.Tower Research Capital. 2025. “Firm Overview.” tower-research.com.Traylor, Jake. 2026. “White House Moves to Sideline Key RFK Jr. Aide as Part of HHS Shake-Up.” MS NOW, February 17.Washington Post. 2024. “The Biggest Campaign Donors of the 2024 Election.”Washington Post. 2025. “RFK Jr. Sought to Trademark MAHA, Transferred It to an Ally’s LLC.” January.World Tribune. 2025. “Who Is Stefanie Spear: RFK Jr.’s Gatekeeper Accused of ‘Ruthlessly Sidelining’ His MAHA Allies.” October 31.

Summary: A view from inside the Washington Beltway. Who actually runs the health department, and whether the movement's founder can win back the people he has lost.


MALONE.NEWS · BOOK REVIEWThe Official Record Is Moving. This Book Is Where It Points.The White House has declassified intelligence on voting-system vulnerabilities. A captured Venezuelan spy chief is writing letters to the President. Ralph Pezzullo’s Stolen Elections is the fullest account yet of the story those developments only begin to tell. Read it, and decide for yourself.Review by Robert W. Malone, MDOn the night of July 16, 2026, President Trump stood in the East Room and declassified a body of intelligence on the security of American elections, then laid it before the country in a primetime address. Alongside the speech, the White House released four sets of documents. They covered vulnerabilities in electronic voting and ballot-counting systems, China’s acquisition of American voter data, a Michigan voter-registration investigation, and noncitizens on state rolls (Fox News 2026).The centerpiece was a declassified CIA memo dated June 29, 2026. It records that the intelligence community rated Smartmatic’s purchase of the American firm Sequoia Voting Systems a moderate threat to national security in 2006, and that the concern was serious enough to force a divestiture through a federal review in 2007 (Military.com 2026). It summarizes reporting that Venezuela built the capacity to alter its own elections. It also draws one clear line. Neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government, the memo concludes, held the access required to change an election result outside Venezuela (CNN 2026).That conclusion is the seam between the official record and this book. The record stops at the exact point the book keeps going.The declassification is one piece of a wider push. The recently resigned Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had taken an unusual and expanding role in election security prior to her departure. Her office obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico and tested them for vulnerabilities, and she was present as FBI agents executed a 2020-related search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia (CNN 2026). The administration has moved on the policy front as well. A March 2026 executive order on citizenship verification and mail ballots was partly blocked in the courts, then partly revived when a federal appeals court let the Postal Service continue its ballot-mail rulemaking on July 17 (NPR 2026; New York Post 2026). The President has said he intends to end mail-in ballots and the machines themselves before the midterms (The Hill 2025).And in a jail in Brooklyn sits Nicolás Maduro, captured and brought to New York to face narcoterrorism charges. His former military intelligence chief, Hugo Carvajal, pleaded guilty in 2025, wrote a letter to President Trump in December, and had his sentencing postponed with no new date, which legal observers read as a possible sign of cooperation (CNN 2026). Carvajal’s letter names Smartmatic.Whatever you conclude about any single item, the larger fact is settled. Three years ago, raising these questions got people banned from platforms. Today the same questions drive presidential declassification, federal prosecution, and executive orders. The topic that was forbidden is now the top of the front page.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareInto this moment, a bookRalph Pezzullo did not writeStolen Electionsto catch a news cycle. He is aNew York Timesbestselling author who has spent a career co-writing with intelligence and special-operations figures, including the former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, with whom he wroteJawbreaker. That matters, because Berntsen is one of the two men at the center of this book. The other is Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan-American financial investigator who worked cases for the DEA. Together, the book tells us, they spent four years running a private criminal investigation into election fraud, at real risk to themselves, with no help from the agencies whose job this was, and in some instances against their active resistance. The book’s path to print carried the same friction. Pezzullo says a major trade publisher signed the book and paid an advance, then declined to release it, and he brought it out himself.I am not going to walk you through what they found. Spoiling it would rob the book of its reason to exist. But the method is worth describing, because the method is what holds you.Pezzullo writes like the professional storyteller he is. The investigation reads like the field reporting it was, source by recruited source, and the men doing the recruiting are the genuine article rather than podcast personalities. The book does not ask you to take its word. Its appendices carry the documents: the federal indictment of Smartmatic co-founder Roger Piñate, the record of USAID grants that pushed this software abroad, Treasury sanctions, the account of a Serbian engineer at the center of the system, and Carvajal’s letter to the President reproduced in full. When Pezzullo makes a claim you can check, he shows you where to check it. That discipline is rare in this genre, and it is why the book earns a serious reading.The scope is enormous. Pezzullo argues that the manipulation reaches across seventy-two countries and back through more than a decade of American elections. He traces Smartmatic from a 2004 Venezuelan referendum to the largest county in the United States. He names the people he believes built the system and the people he believes protected it. If even a fraction survives scrutiny, the story is a large one. He believes all of it survives, and he argues it with more specificity than anyone before him.Where the book goes past the record, and why that is the reason to read itThe memo’s conclusion is where the disagreement starts. The government’s own declassified assessment says the access needed to alter an American election from Venezuela did not exist. Pezzullo argues that it did exist and was used. That is not a small gap. It is the central question, and the administration’s own document lands on the opposite side of it from the book.I am not going to paper over that, and you should be suspicious of any reviewer who does. Parts of this book rest on anonymous sources whose claims cannot be independently verified. The most sweeping assertions, that specific past presidential outcomes were determined from abroad, go well beyond what any court, any audit, or any declassified memo has established. The Carvajal material is a live development, and reading a former spy chief describe the system from the inside is arresting. It is also a set of allegations from a man who pleaded guilty to narcoterrorism and has every reason to tell this administration what it wants to hear, and no court has tested a word of it. A related document circulating online, a list purporting to name dozens of bribed American senators, appears to be fabricated even by the account of sympathetic writers (Houk 2026). The information environment around this story is treacherous, and a careful reader has to keep his footing.None of that is a reason to skip the book. It is the reason to read it.You are going to form a view on this. The President is declassifying documents about it. Federal prosecutors have indicted a voting-machine company and its parent, though on financial crimes rather than vote-rigging, and have traced money from the Los Angeles contract into the same structure used to bribe an election official abroad (Willkie Compliance Concourse 2025; The Guardian 2025). A cooperating witness may be about to talk. You can form your view from headlines and hostile summaries, or from the fullest primary argument anyone has assembled.Stolen Electionsis that argument. Reading it does not commit you to believing it. It commits you to understanding, in detail and from the source, what the official record is now circling. A serious citizen reads a serious claim and weighs it for himself.This is the ground Malone.News intends to hold, and it is nearly empty. Most of the press will not touch the book except to sneer. Much of the alternative media will cheer it without reading past the jacket. Almost no one stands in between, crediting what is documented and marking plainly what is not. An honest center-right reader deserves that middle ground, and few are offering it.Read it before you decideThe declassified memo, the captured regime, the cooperating spy chief, the indicted vendor, the executive orders working through the courts. None of it is a forecast. It is this month’s news. Ralph Pezzullo wrote the backstory to all of it before most of it broke, and he wrote it as a narrative you will not put down and a dossier you can argue with.You will not agree with every page. I did not. That is not the standard for whether a book is worth your time. The standard is whether it sharpens how you see the question and equips you to judge it for yourself, and by that standardStolen Electionsearns its place on the shelf beside the declassified documents it anticipates.Buy it. Read it. Then hand it to the person in your life who still believes this question was settled, and ask them to do the same.The record is moving. Get ahead of it.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.About the authorRalph Pezzullo is aNew York Timesand international bestselling author whose books have sold more than six million copies. He has written more than thirty of them, most by the same method: working with CIA officers, Special Forces soldiers, and federal agents to turn their firsthand accounts into print. The best known isJawbreaker, his inside history of the CIA’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, written with the former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, who is one of the two investigators at the center ofStolen Elections. Paramount Pictures bought the film rights toJawbreaker, with Oliver Stone attached to direct. His other books includeZero Footprint,Left of Boom,Ghost, and theSEAL Team Sixseries. He covered Latin America as an Associated Press correspondent, and he grew up inside American diplomacy as the son of Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo, who helped negotiate the 1979 departure of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. He hosts the documentary podcastHeroes Behind Headlines. He has reported this world for decades, and that record is why the book deserves a hearing.Ralph Pezzullo,Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide. HBH Books, hardback September 2025, paperback January 2026. Hardback ISBN 979-8-9997530-0-7; paperback ISBN 979-8-9997530-1-4.Available on Amazon. More atstolenelections.us.Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, is a physician-scientist, an inventor of the foundational mRNA vaccine technology, and a co-author, with Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD, of Lies My Gov’t Told Me and the forthcoming Homesteading for Health. He writes at malone.news.REFERENCESCentral Intelligence Agency. 2026. “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting From 2004 to 2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities.” Declassified memo dated June 29, 2026.CNN Politics. 2026. “Key moments from Trump’s speech claiming declassified documents show US election vulnerabilities.” July 17, 2026.CNN. 2026. “Could Hugo Carvajal Barrios be a witness in Maduro trial?” April 26, 2026.CNN Politics. 2026. “Intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard’s office obtained and tested voting machines in Puerto Rico.” February 4, 2026.Fox News. 2026. “Trump White House releases election integrity files after primetime address.” July 2026.The Guardian (Zetter, Kim). 2025. “New Allegations Against Smartmatic Executive in Company’s Voting Machine Contract with LA County.”Houk, John R. 2026. “Looking at the ‘Venezuela List’ Attributed to Hugo Carvajal.” January 6, 2026.The Hill. 2025. “Trump takes aim at mail-in ballots, ‘controversial’ voting machines.” August 2025.Military.com. 2026. “Trump Declassifies CIA Intelligence on Alleged Maduro Election-Rigging Efforts.” July 2026.NPR. 2026. “Trump signs a new executive order on voting. Experts say he lacks the authority.” March 31, 2026.Pezzullo, Ralph. 2025. Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide. HBH Books.New York Post. 2026. “USPS to move forward with major mail-in voting change: ‘A win for election integrity.’” July 18, 2026.Willkie Compliance Concourse. 2025. “Smartmatic Charged in the Southern District of Florida for Allegedly Bribing a Philippine Official.” October 27, 2025.

Summary: White House declassified voting system vulnerability intelligence. A captured Venezuelan spy chief is writing letters to the President. Ralph Pezzullo's Stolen Elections is the fullest accounting yet.


The Fabian Society:

Audio Version:I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcastwhile mowing the mare pasture the other day. Joe had Rupert Lowe on, aBritish politician and businessman who has served as a Member of Parliament since July 2024. Lowe is currently the leader of Restore Britain. In that conversation, theybriefly touched on the Fabian Society and its infamous wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing emblem shown above.Most people have not heard the name. Few remember what the Fabian Society actually was, or why it still matters. Yet it is the most important organization that you have hardly heard of.  The Fabian Society is directly responsible for the new world order foisted upon us by the globalists in the 20th century.  But let’s start at the beginning.The Fabian Society was founded in London on January 4, 1884, as an offshoot of an earlier organization called the Fellowship of the New Life. That movement promoted ethical living, social reform, and the belief that society could be remade through gradual cultural change rather than revolution. Some members concluded that personal example was not enough. If they wanted to reshape society, they would have to reshape government as well. The Fabian Society became their political vehicle.Unlike Marxists, the Fabians rejected violent revolution. Their strategy was far more patient. Rather than tearing down existing institutions, they intended to slowly capture them from within. Schools, universities, civil service, journalism, law, and eventually political parties all became vehicles through which socialist ideas could be normalized one small step at a time.Their symbols reflected that strategy. The tortoise represented gradual, almost imperceptible progress toward socialism. Their original coat of arms, however, was far more revealing: a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The symbolism was difficult to miss. The Society openly embraced the idea that its goals would be achieved through persuasion, incrementalism, and careful political camouflage rather than open confrontation. Unsurprisingly, the wolf emblem eventually disappeared as its public relations value became impossible to defend.During the early twentieth century, Fabian writers developed an intellectual framework for industrial Britain that emphasized cooperative economics and steadily reducing the role of private ownership of capital and land. Their influence extended well beyond pamphlets and lectures. Fabian ideas became deeply embedded within the British Labour movement, helping shape generations of politicians, civil servants, academics, and policy advisers.That influence has hardly disappeared. Throughout the twentieth century, the Fabian Society remained one of Labour’s most influential intellectual institutions and that has continued into the 21st century. They publish policy papers, host conferences, train young political leaders, and cultivate future Labour officials through organizations such as the Young Fabians and the Fabian Women’s Network. While the rhetoric has evolved with the times, the underlying strategy has remained remarkably consistent: achieve profound political and social change not through dramatic revolution, but through the steady, often unnoticed, transformation of institutions.The Fabians Conquered Great Britain a Long Time AgoThe Fabian Society is no longer important because of the number of its members. It is important because its strategy succeeded. The organization no longer needs to command the political battlefield because the battlefield itself has been reshaped.The original Fabians rejected revolution. They believed that socialism would never gain lasting acceptance if it arrived through barricades and bloodshed. Instead, their brilliant strategy advocated a slow march through society’s institutions, replacing old assumptions with new ones over decades rather than months. Their goal was not simply to elect politicians. It was to educate teachers, influence journalists, train civil servants, shape judges, advise bureaucrats, and eventually redefine what the public considered normal.Measured against that objective, the Fabians won. One remarkable fact is how completely the Fabian Society achieved its long game.  It has spent nearly a century and a half shaping the intellectual direction of the Labour Party.Every Labour prime minister, from Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown,Keir Starmer, and now Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, has been associated with the Fabian Society. This is not a hidden conspiracy. The Society proudly advertises the fact. The Fabian Society is the principal policy incubator for Britain's left-wing governing class. Its success was never measured by fiery speeches or barricades in the streets, but by something far more enduring: the steady occupation of the institutions that write policy, train civil servants, influence universities, and ultimately produce the people who govern the nation.Britain today bears little resemblance to the nation that existed when Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Graham Wallas founded the Society in 1884. The modern British state reaches into nearly every aspect of economic and social life. Healthcare, education, welfare, housing, taxation, energy policy, industrial policy, environmental regulation, and increasingly even speech are influenced by an administrative state that would have been almost unimaginable in Victorian England.This transformation did not happen through revolution. It happened one committee, one regulation, one university department, one government agency, and one generation at a time.That same philosophy can now be seen well beyond Britain.The language has changed, but the method remains remarkably familiar. Today’s political battles are increasingly fought through ESG standards, DEI mandates, sustainability metrics, corporate governance rules, accreditation bodies, professional licensing boards, international organizations, and regulatory agencies. These mechanisms rarely require voters to approve sweeping ideological change. Instead, they alter the incentives that govern institutions, which in turn reshape the behavior of individuals.Whether one supports these initiatives or opposes them is almost beside the point. They reflect a distinctly Fabian approach to political change. Rather than persuading citizens to embrace an entirely new social contract, institutions gradually redefine the rules under which citizens live and work. Over time, what once would have provoked fierce political debate simply becomes accepted practice.Perhaps the Society’s greatest achievement was making itself appear unnecessary. Today, relatively few people identify as Fabians, yet countless politicians, academics, journalists, corporate executives, and bureaucrats employ methods that would have been immediately recognizable to Sidney Webb, one of the original founders. The tortoise reached the finish line so quietly that most people never realized it was a race.The Fabians understood that whoever controls the institutions eventually controls the politics. Elections come and go. Governments rise and fall. Institutions endure.Their vision unfolded over more than a century, and it followed a remarkably consistent path.First came the argument that government should become more rational and less political.Next: If society was becoming more complex, then experts should increasingly replace politicians in making important decisions.As government expanded, so did the administrative state.Independent commissions and regulatory agencies accumulated authority that once belonged to elected legislatures.National bureaucracies increasingly coordinated with international organizations.Public policy became harmonized across borders.Corporate governance evolved alongside government regulation, producing concepts such as ESG and DEI that increasingly shaped behavior without requiring legislation.Financial governance moved toward central bank digital currencies.Artificial intelligence is now being positioned as the next generation of expert-assisted governance.This is the story of the administrative state gradually replacing democratic accountability as the preferred mechanism of governance. The economy may remain capitalist. Elections may continue to be held. But increasingly, the decisions that shape daily life are made by regulators, standards boards, international organizations, corporate governance committees, central banks, and technical experts rather than by representatives directly accountable to voters.That was the Fabian insight from the very beginning. Change the institutions, and eventually the politics will follow.From Westminster to the United NationsThe Fabian Society did not simply change British politics. Its influence spread first through the British colonies and then throughout the English-speaking world. Eventually, it extended into many of the international institutions created after the Second World War.This should not be surprising. The Fabians never viewed the nation-state as the final destination. Their objective was rational administration by trained experts globally. Political questions, in their view, should increasingly become technical questions to be managed by professionals rather than decided by ordinary citizens. The larger the institution, the greater the opportunity to implement “uniform standards” across society.Many of the architects of Britain’s postwar welfare state also participated in building the international order that emerged after 1945. Fabian ideas helped shape economic planning, social welfare, labor policy, public health, education, and international development.Organizations such as the United Nations and its specialized agencies became natural homes for this style of governance. Decisions once made by elected legislatures increasingly became recommendations, standards, frameworks, or best practices issued by international bureaucracies and then adopted by national governments.The intellectual overlap is not accidental. Both Fabianism and the postwar international system placed extraordinary faith in expertise, centralized planning, and the belief that complex societies could be managed more effectively by specialists than by the rough and often unpredictable process of democratic politics.The first Director-General of UNESCO, Sir Julian Huxley, provides an excellent example. Huxley openly advocated what he called “evolutionary humanism” and envisioned UNESCO as an institution capable of gradually fostering a common world culture. His writings described education not merely as the transmission of knowledge but as an instrument for reshaping civilization itself. Anyone who has read UNESCO’s founding philosophy will recognize themes that would have been entirely familiar to the Fabian founders: gradualism, expert administration, social engineering, centralized planning, and confidence that enlightened institutions should guide public opinion rather than merely reflect it.From Britain to America: Exporting an IdeaThe Fabian Society never expected to transform the world through elections alone. Ideas travel farther than political parties, and institutions often outlive governments. From the beginning, the Fabians understood that if they could shape the education of future leaders, civil servants, economists, and policymakers, their philosophy would spread far beyond Britain itself.One of their greatest achievements was the founding of the London School of Economics in 1895. Established by the leading Fabians of the time, the school was intended to be far more than another university. It was designed to educate the administrators of a modern state. Rather than training philosophers or political theorists, it emphasized economics, public administration, statistics, and the practical management of government. Over the next century, the London School of Economics became one of the world’s premier institutions for educating economists, diplomats, senior civil servants, and political leaders from every continent.Its influence extended well beyond Britain. During the Progressive Era, many American scholars and reformers looked to British municipal government as a model for managing rapidly growing industrial cities. They admired Britain’s increasingly professional civil service, its expanding public health system, and its reliance on trained experts to solve social problems. The question was no longer simply who should govern. Increasingly, it became who possessed the expertise to govern well.Few Americans expressed this philosophy more clearly than Woodrow Wilson. Long before entering the White House, Wilson argued that public administration should become a professional discipline, insulated as much as possible from ordinary politics. Although he was never a Fabian, as that was a British organization, his writings reflected many of the same assumptions: that modern government required trained administrators, specialized knowledge, and institutions capable of operating beyond the turbulence of electoral politics.These ideas continued to evolve throughout the twentieth century. Universities established schools of public administration and public policy. Independent research organizations and policy institutes emerged to advise governments on increasingly complex economic, military, and social problems. Institutions such as the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation, and countless university-affiliated policy centers reflected a growing confidence that expertise, data, and professional analysis could produce better governance than partisan politics alone.The result was a profound change in the mission of higher education. Universities no longer existed simply to educate citizens or cultivate statesmen. Increasingly, they trained administrators, regulators, economists, planners, policy analysts, and technical experts who would move between government, academia, foundations, corporations, and international organizations. Whether consciously influenced by Fabian writings or not, many of these institutions embraced the same underlying premise: that the management of society should increasingly rest in the hands of credentialed professionals rather than elected representatives.By the middle of the twentieth century, Fabianism had become something larger than a British political society. Its most enduring legacy was not a political party, but a way of thinking about governance that has spread throughout much of the Western world.Fabianism Comes to AmericaThe United States never developed a mass Fabian Party. It did not need one.American political culture has always been skeptical of socialism when presented openly, that is, until recently. But Americans have historically been far more receptive to progressive reforms framed as efficiency, expertise, modernization, scientific management, or good government.Rather than advancing through an explicitly socialist movement, Fabian-style thinking entered the United States through elite universities, philanthropic foundations, professional associations, civil service reform, and the expanding federal bureaucracy during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The emphasis was not on class struggle. It was on replacing local decision-making with “credentialed expertise,” trained in institutions, whose approach reflected many of the same assumptions about expert administration, credentialed authority, and centralized governance that the Fabians had been advocating for decades.If you educate the teachers, train the civil servants, influence the economists, and shape the universities, you don’t need to seize power. Over time, the people graduating from those institutions become the administrators, judges, journalists, policy analysts, and politicians who govern society. The result is not revolution, but a gradual shift in how government thinks about itself. The arena of political change moves from the ballot box to the bureaucracy, from legislatures to regulatory agencies, and from public debate to expert administration.The modern administrative state reflects precisely these assumptions. Congress increasingly delegates its legislative authority to agencies that issue thousands of regulations carrying the force of law. Courts often defer to specialized expertise rather than elected representatives. Universities train successive generations of policymakers who rotate between government, multinational corporations, NGOs, foundations, and international organizations. Increasingly, those same institutions establish the standards governing finance, environmental policy, public health, education, employment, and corporate behavior. Elections still matter, but much of modern governance now occurs beyond the ballot box.The Fabian method has always favored incremental institutional change over direct political confrontation. In that sense, its greatest American success may not be any single law or political party. It is the widespread acceptance that experts, regulators, and large institutions should increasingly shape public life while elected representatives ratify decisions that have largely already been made.From Economic Socialism to Social JusticeBy the end of the twentieth century, something remarkable had happened. The old economic debate had largely been settled. Central planning had repeatedly failed wherever it had been fully implemented. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic stagnation of Eastern Europe, and the market reforms adopted even by communist China made it increasingly difficult to argue that government ownership of the means of production represented the future of prosperous societies.Author James Lindsay has argued that much of the modern “Social Justice” movement represents precisely this adaptation. Rather than organizing politics primarily around economic class, contemporary activists increasingly organize society around identity groups defined by race, sex, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other characteristics. Economic redistribution is replaced by the redistribution of power, status, opportunity, representation, and cultural influence. Lindsay argues that the language of communism changed, but the underlying revolutionary framework remained remarkably familiar. The Fabians now use social justice as the primary justification for socialism or communism, having failed on the economic front.The focus of political conflict has steadily shifted from ownership of factories to governance of institutions. Universities, accreditation bodies, professional associations, corporations, media organizations, public health agencies, financial institutions, and international organizations increasingly became the arena in which political objectives were pursued. Rather than nationalizing industries, modern movements often seek to redefine the rules under which those industries operate.Viewed through the Fabian lens, this evolution is not especially surprising. The Fabians never insisted that socialism required the immediate abolition of markets. Their strategy was always incremental. Change the assumptions taught in universities. Change the standards governing professions. Change the regulations that shape corporations. Change the bureaucracies that administer public life. Over time, political outcomes would follow naturally.This is why the modern debate increasingly revolves around ESG, DEI, sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, public-private partnerships, pandemic preparedness, and global governance rather than nationalization of steel mills or collective farms. The battlefield shifted from ownership to administration. The question is no longer simply who owns the economy. It is who writes the rules under which the economy operates.Winning the UniversitiesThe Fabians understood something that revolutionaries often overlooked. Political victories are temporary. Educational victories can last for generations.Governments come and go. Professors remain. Politicians write today’s laws. Professors educate the people who will write tomorrow’s.The early Fabians understood that they did not need to win every election. They needed to influence the people who educated the next generation of economists, teachers, journalists, lawyers, judges, and civil servants. Institutions are self-replicating. Professors train professors. Teachers train teachers. Civil servants recruit civil servants. Once the assumptions become embedded in the institutions, the institutions perpetuate themselves.That was one reason the Fabians founded the London School of Economics in 1895. It was not intended to be simply another university. It was designed to educate the administrators of the modern state. Economics, statistics, public administration, labor policy, and social planning became disciplines through which government itself could increasingly be viewed as a scientific enterprise rather than merely a political one.Oxford and Cambridge were already educating Britain’s governing class. The Fabians did not need to capture either institution. They needed enough respected scholars, economists, historians, and political theorists who shared their assumptions to gradually become accepted scholarship. Universities rarely change overnight. One generation simply teaches the next. Intellectual fashions become intellectual orthodoxy.The London School of Economics complemented those older universities by producing economists, planners, civil servants, and policy specialists. Fabian Summer Schools, the Workers’ Educational Association, and adult education programs carried many of the same ideas far beyond the campus into local government, labor organizations, and public life. At the same time, Britain’s expanding civil service increasingly rewarded technical expertise. Government ceased to be viewed primarily as a political responsibility and increasingly became a technical profession.For those interested in the distorted and weaponized disease modeling that underpinned the global COVID response,the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the academic home of the modeling group in question, are both constituent colleges of the University of London and maintain a formal academic partnership.  Specifically, the two institutions offer a joint master’s program in Health Policy, Planning and Financing.The same philosophy crossed the Atlantic during the Progressive Era of 1890 to 1920. American reformers admired Britain’s professional civil service and increasingly organized universities around schools of public administration, public policy, education, and social work. Their graduates moved easily between government, universities, foundations, corporations, and international organizations, carrying with them a common belief that complex societies were best managed by credentialed experts.Education itself became an object of scientific management. John Dewey argued that schools should shape citizens, not merely transmit knowledge. Columbia Teachers College became one of the most influential teacher-training institutions in America, exporting mostly educational socialist philosophy through thousands of graduates who would educate millions of children. After the Second World War, UNESCO extended similar ideas globally. Its first Director-General, Sir Julian Huxley, viewed education not simply as preserving civilization but as an instrument for guiding social change and fostering a common world culture.None of this required a conspiracy, nor did it require every university to become Fabian. Ideas spread because universities educate the people who eventually govern. Once enough institutions embraced the same assumptions, those assumptions became self-reinforcing. Graduates staffed government agencies, wrote regulations, trained future teachers, advised corporations, and educated the next generation.The Fabians did not need to control every university. They simply needed enough universities to educate enough teachers, economists, lawyers, journalists, and civil servants that their assumptions became the default assumptions of public life. Once those assumptions became orthodoxy, the Society itself became almost irrelevant. The graduates carried the philosophy forward whether they had ever heard the name Sidney Webb or not.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to cross-post, republish with author attribution, or share it on social media or by email.ShareFabianism and the New World OrderThe Fabians do not envision a dramatic seizure of power. They envision something far more durable: a world increasingly governed by experts, administrators, commissions, international organizations, and bureaucracies that would operate above the turbulence of electoral politics. Their objective was not merely to elect socialists. It was to change how societies are governed.Viewed through that lens, many of the defining institutions of the postwar era begin to look less like isolated developments and more like pieces of a broader intellectual trend. International organizations, transnational regulatory bodies, global public-private partnerships, multinational financial institutions, and increasingly harmonized regulatory frameworks all rest upon a common assumption: that many of humanity’s greatest challenges are best managed by centralized expertise operating across national boundaries.This philosophy has become known by many names. Internationalism. Stakeholder capitalism. Sustainable development. Global governance. More recently, ESG, DEI, and the language of “whole-of-society” solutions. The vocabulary changes every decade. The underlying premise changes very little.This was thegreat post-Cold War consensus, which has been rebranded again and is now known as “democratic socialism.”National sovereignty, local autonomy, and democratic accountability inevitably become secondary when decisions are increasingly made by institutions that are insulated from direct electoral control. Rules become standards. Standards become regulations. Regulations become expectations. Eventually, expectations become accepted reality, often without a single national referendum or meaningful public debate.Advocates contend that global issues demand global institutions. They argue that financial instability, cybercrime, terrorism, and international trade cannot be effectively handled by individual nations alone. Yet global programs have also been exploited for financial gain and dominance. Examples like climate change and the pandemic show how these institutions are often manipulated for power as well as commercial interests and control. The question is not whether cooperation is necessary. The question is where cooperation ends, and governance begins.When international organizations coordinate sovereign governments, they serve democracy. When they begin to shape national policy without direct democratic accountability, the balance shifts. Citizens increasingly find themselves governed by frameworks they never voted for, implemented by officials they cannot remove, and justified by experts they cannot question.  If you want to see a leading example of how this works (or doesn’t), look no further than the European Union, and specifically the European Council.Whether one calls this globalism, stakeholder governance, or simply modern administration, the method is unmistakably familiar. The governance becomes institutional rather than electoral. Incremental rather than dramatic. It does not seek to overthrow existing systems overnight. It seeks to redefine them until the old assumptions quietly disappear.The wolf no longer wears the sheep’s clothing emblazoned on the Fabian Society’s original crest. In truth, it no longer needs the disguise. After more than a century of gradual institutional change, many of the assumptions that animated the early Fabians have become so deeply embedded in political, academic, corporate, and international institutions that we are no longer even aware of them.Perhaps that is the Fabians' greatest achievement. The victory was not simply that the Fabians conquered Britain or influenced the West. Their real triumph was changing how modern bureaucracies think about governance itself. More than a century after the Society was founded in London, much of the Western world now accepts as perfectly normal the idea that experts, regulators, international institutions, and administrative bodies should increasingly shape public policy while elected governments ratify decisions already made elsewhere. Rewiring institutions changes civilizations. That was the Fabian strategy from the beginning, and history suggests it has been remarkably successful.End.By: JGMIf you’ve made it this far, thank you.One of the themes running through this essay is that institutions matter. They shape what gets taught, what gets researched, what gets published, and ultimately what the public comes to accept as common sense. That is precisely why independent institutions matter just as much.Malone News has never been backed by a political party, a foundation, a pharmaceutical company, or a government grant. We answer to our readers and no one else. 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Summary: conquering the free world