Measles. Yes, yes, I know you’re sick of hearing about it. For that, though, you must lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and this entire administration of clown-tools that isn’t bothering to do anything about what has become the worst continuous outbreak of the disease in America in several decades. Their fault, not mine.
And, yes, this is getting worse, not better. The CDC’s measles tracking site is a combination of woefully inaccurate and behind when it comes to current case counts (more to come on that shortly), but it’s at least useful in benchmarking what 2025 looked like. While certainly underreported, the CDC tallied 2,281 cases of measles in America last year. That site is updated only once a week on Fridays. Either due to that, or incompetence, or a more nefarious attempt to downplay the problem, the current case count is wrong.
The CDC site shows a 2026 case count of 982. That would be bad enough, but it’s actually worse. The actual count is well over 1,000 cases, which means we’re somewhere right around half of 2026’s case total as of right now. So you don’t feel the need to check a calendar, it’s still February.
“It is very concerning to see more than 1,000 cases in the U.S. this early in the year,” Martha Edwards, MD, president of the South Carolina Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told MedPage Today. “Already, we have more than half the number of cases seen in all of 2025, and the number of cases in 2025 was one of the highest annual case counts seen in decades.”
“As people continue to believe inaccurate information about vaccines, and as non-medical exemption rates continue to rise throughout the country, we can expect case counts to continue to rise, threatening children and immunocompromised individuals with a disease that was nearly eliminated in our country through vaccination,” she added.
The true number is going to be even higher than that. There are outbreaks of one size or another in many, many states. South Carolina alone has nearly 1,000 reported cases. The truly frustrating thing about all of this is that this problem is a simple one to fix. More people need to get vaccinated for measles via the widely available MMR vaccine.
To achieve that, the government needs to do two simple things. First, cut the shit when it comes to the misinformation about vaccines that is scaring the hell out of a percentage of the population. In fact, advocate for those same vaccines. Get Kennedy hopped up on those psychedelics he likes if you need to, but he needs to be front and center telling people to get vaccinated. And stop the nonsense that is going on with supposed religious exemptions for vaccinations.
Edwards highlighted the need for “accurate information about the dangers of measles virus and the complications that can ensue, in addition to communicating the safety and efficacy of the measles vaccine.”
“Raising the bar to obtain non-medical exemptions for vaccines and requiring families to gain accurate information about the dangers of vaccine-preventable illnesses and the importance of vaccines would be a huge benefit in helping to raise vaccination rates in South Carolina and the rest of the country,” she added. “We would love to see a requirement for parents to come in person to the health department, watch a video on vaccine-preventable illnesses, and have a conversation with a healthcare professional before they choose non-medical exemptions.”
Second, take the data collection and sharing about measles seriously. Along those same lines, demonstrate leadership by helping state governments and local medical facilities collect and share data, strategize protective measures to stop the spread of the disease, and pump the ecosystem full of real-time accurate information about where the disease is, how it spreads, and how to handle an infection.
That isn’t happening. Instead, you get stories like how South Carolina’s state government doesn’t require any mandatory reporting of measles cases in the state when patients are admitted. One doctor in the state had to find out that patients in her own area had been hospitalized with measles from Facebook.
Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician working a county away, wasn’t even aware that anyone in South Carolina had been hospitalized with measles-related illnesses until a short time later when she logged on to Facebook and saw someone relay the distraught husband’s comments.
Part of the reason Bragg didn’t know is that South Carolina doesn’t require hospitals to report admissions for measles, potentially obscuring the disease’s severity. In the absence of mandatory reporting rules, she and other doctors are often left to rely on rumors, their grapevines of colleagues, and the fragments of information the state public health agency is able to gather and willing to share.
So, what you get is South Carolina reporting that roughly 2% of its measles cases have resulted in hospitalization. Nobody with any knowledge of measles thinks that is even remotely accurate.
“A hospitalization rate at 2% is ludicrous,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who served on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s immunization advisory committee.
“It’s vast underreporting,” Offit said. “Measles makes you sick.”
Without that sort of accurate data, neither the state nor federal government knows where to help, nor how how much help is needed. If Kennedy and Trump wanted to actually confront this growing problem, that’s the kind of organization the federal government and its health-related agencies could help with. But this administration seems content to put its hands over its eyes and shout, “Nuh uh, I can’t see you!”
This is going to continue to get worse until real action is taken. Until then, I guess we all just try to keep an eye out for rashes.
The current measles shitstorm in South Carolina has been burning for several months now, dating all the way back to October of 2025. What started with a bunch of counties that were undervaccinated for measles began spiraling out of control at the start of 2026. The federal tracker for measles cases is at best woefully out of date, or purposefully obfuscating the true degree of the problem at worst. That public tracker, which is updated every Friday, claims a current nationwide count of confirmed measles cases at 910. The current measles count in South Carolina alone, for this year, is 933. Once again we have a federal government program run by RFK Jr. that is behind, unprepared, and impotent.
In the absence of federal leadership, the states will attempt to take action on their own. And sometimes those actions will result in federal pushback from the very same people who are causing the problem through inaction in the first place. I have no doubt that will be the case with a South Carolina state senator’s attempt at a bill to remove the religious exemptions for vaccinations for public schools in the state.
The context here is that South Carolina has one of the most wide open programs for obtaining a religious exemption for a childhood vaccine in the country. I think only Florida might be considered more wide open, given that state has mostly removed all vaccination requirements for public schooling. In South Carolina, you essentially just have to whisper the word “religion” and you’re exempt.
But that wont’ be the case if Senator Margie Mathews gets her way.
Senator Margie Bright Matthews (D-Dist. 45) has introduced a bill that would eliminate religious exemptions for measles vaccinations for students in public K–12 schools and childcare settings. It’s a move that’s drawing both support and criticism across the state.
Matthews said the rising measles cases prompted her to step in with the proposed legislation in an effort to bolster public health and keep communities safe.
“The goal of the bill is simply to protect children and stop the spread of measles in South Carolina,” Matthews said.
Yes, of course it is. And the pushback that has already begun within the state is absurd. I know enough about religion, as well as religious demographics, to know with absolute certainty that the number of “religious exemptions” in South Carolina doesn’t remotely comport with the number of religious adherents to any religion that has anything to say about vaccinations. South Carolina is largely Protestant and Catholic, for instance. While Protestants have traditionally been in the vaccine hesitant camp, I have never heard a serious biblical argument made for that stance. Were one to even exist, I’m confident most of the people applying for exemptions couldn’t make it.
Instead, these people are vaccine hesitant for entirely non-religious reasons. And that, I will say, is their right. But this legislation suggests that nobody’s right to their religion includes the right to put the rest of their community in danger.
Senator Matthews stressed that the goal of the bill is to increase vaccination rates and limit the spread of measles.
“I plan on reminding them every time we have new cases in South Carolina, I plan on writing and requesting that my bill receive a hearing before the committee, so that we can have the influencers from South Carolina that are against this bill and that are for this bill, I would like to have public hearing in reference to it,” she said.
Despite my strict adherence to being non-religious, I am, in fact, sensitive to ensuring that we maintain the secular rights of those who don’t agree with me. It’s that secularism that has allowed the flourishing of both free speech and thought in this country as well as, perhaps ironically, of religion itself. All of that is just aces as far as I’m concerned.
But just like someone’s freedom of movement ends the moment their fist makes contact with my face, so too does the rights of religious freedom end at the point where it puts everyone else’s children in danger.
It’s darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn’t funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we’re proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak in America continues to rage, immigration detention camps are starting to feel the effects.
Earlier this week reports indicated the Dilley detention center in Texas was going on a sort of soft lockdown due to confirmed cases of measles among those detained.
“ICE Health Services Corps immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread and infection, ceasing all movement within the facility and quarantining all individuals suspected of making contact with the infected,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin said medical officials were monitoring detainees and taking “appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection.”
“All detainees are being provided with proper medical care,” she added.
We are definitely in “prove it” territory when it comes to this administration and immigration questions. That’s all the more so if the government, as they’ve done via other excuses in the past, limits or restrains entry to these facilities from other lawmakers who want to check DHS’ homework and uses the measles outbreak as the reason for it.
Neha Desai, a lawyer for the California-based National Center of Youth Law, which represents children in U.S. immigration custody, said she hopes the measles infections at Dilley are not used to “unnecessarily” prevent lawmakers and attorneys from inspecting the detention center in the near future, citing broader concerns about the facility.
“In the meantime, we are deeply concerned for the physical and the mental health of every family detained at Dilley,” Desai said. “It is important to remember that no family needs to be detained — this is a choice that the administration is making.”
It’s also worth remembering that the spread of disease is a recurring feature in the concentration camp industry. Deaths from disease as well. And, unlike the trope mentioned above, these are infections immigrants are getting from America, not bringing to her soil.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports one ICE detainee in the Florence Detention Center in Pinal County tested positive for measles on Jan. 21.
Two more measles cases have recently been confirmed among people who are also in federal custody in the county, according to a spokesperson for the Pinal County Public Health Services District. But the spokesperson did not provide details about which facility the other two infected individuals are in, or whether any of the three cases in the county are linked.
As Desai said in the quote above, this is a choice. Or, rather, a series of choices. It’s a choice made by Trump and his minions to carry out this inhumane, disorganized, haphazard campaign of brutality on illegal immigrants. This could have gone many ways, but Trump chose cruelty on purpose. It’s a choice to put RFK Jr. in charge of America’s health and then watch idly, leaning back with folded arms, as the country experiences the worst measles outbreak in decades over the past 13 months. It’s a choice to not pivot on any of the above.
State health officials are reporting 29 new cases of measles in the state since Friday, bringing the total number of cases in South Carolina related to the Upstate outbreak to 876. The South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) said there are currently 354 people in quarantine and 22 in isolation. The latest end of quarantine for these cases is Feb. 24.
Those numbers will continue to rise, but they are already breathtaking. 2025 saw a measles infection count nationwide of 2,267. South Carolina has generated nearly 40% of that total in one month in one state. 18 states have already had measles infections within their borders this year. The 2026 totals are going to make 2025 look like peanuts.
And it could potentially be hardest on the human beings who are shoved like sardines into these immigrant detention camps. Diseases like the measles will spread incredibly fast there. And, despite DHS’ claims to the contrary, I just can’t find it in me to believe that this administration is going to put a priority on detainee’s health.
America is broken and it seems like nobody is bothering to try to repair it. That’s a general statement, to be sure, so if you need some marking point to serve as a specific example of our national malfunction, the return of measles to our country can fit the bill. It’s not quite as flashy as the secret police shooting citizens, of course. But I think that there is something about children with angry rashes across their necks sitting in hospital beds, or in body bags, that will have a way of clarifying the mind.
With a grifter like RFK Jr. at the helm of American health, having built a career based on anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories and health misinformation, our country became a fertile host once more to this horrific disease. Kennedy’s inability to properly communicate to the nation what needs to happen, which is another concentrated MMR vaccination effort, combined with his eugenics-lite belief system on matters of health, has all led to this. 2025 saw the highest number of Americans infected by measles in decades, 3 people died, we’re about to lose our elimination status for the disease, and an outbreak in South Carolina has us off to a rip roaring start to 2026.
While this is largely due to the unvaccinated population among us, allowing the disease to spread where it otherwise would not, we’ve seen enough breakthrough infections that even being one of the “responsible ones” won’t necessarily keep you safe any longer. And the South Carolina outbreak of measles is officially off the rails.
A week ago, ArsTechnica had an alarming post about how South Carolina saw well over a hundred new cases of measles and over 400 people quarantined in a handful of days.
Amid the outbreak, South Carolina health officials have been providing updates on cases every Tuesday and Friday. On Tuesday, state health officials reported 124 more cases since last Friday, which had 99 new cases since the previous Tuesday. On that day, January 6, officials noted a more modest increase of 26 cases, bringing the outbreak total at that point to 211 cases.
With the 3-month-old outbreak now doubled in just a week, health officials are renewing calls for people to get vaccinated against the highly infectious virus—an effort that has met with little success since October. Still, the health department is activating its mobile health unit to offer free measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccinations, as well as flu vaccinations at two locations today and Thursday in the Spartanburg area, the epicenter of the outbreak.
Those same officials had another dire warning: the outbreak had grown so big that they no longer had the ability to perform contact tracing. Where the disease would go next was anyone’s guess.
The outbreak is still growing to date. At least 88 more cases of measles were recorded in South Carolina in less than a week since the Ars post. Schools remain the most problematic vector, but it’s no longer just elementary and secondary schools that are in trouble. Colleges are now part of the party.
There are at least 15 schools — including elementary, middle and high schools — which currently have students in quarantine.
Health officials also warned of exposures at Clemson University and Anderson University, both located in northwestern South Carolina, which have a combined 88 students in quarantine.
While these numbers from South Carolina are publicly stated, the CDC site tallying measles infections apparently can’t keep up. The last time the numbers were updated there was January 14th, but even those numbers appear to be incorrectly low. The site also announces that it is moving its reporting schedule from every Wednesday to Fridays, which is your classic “bad news dumping ground” day.
Measles continue to spread in the Upstate but now, health leaders in Washington state say the outbreak here in South Carolina is connected to cases on the west coast. The Snohomish County Health Department confirmed three cases in children who were exposed to a contagious family visiting from South Carolina.
Previously, the Snohomish County Health Department and Public Health – Seattle & King County were notified that three members of a South Carolina family, one adult and two children, were infectious while visiting King and Snohomish counties from Dec. 27, 2025 through Jan. 1, 2026. The family visited multiple locations in Everett, Marysville and Mukilteo while contagious before being diagnosed. They also traveled through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and visited a car rental facility near the airport.
In any sane administration, a measles task force would be mobilized to build out a strategy to contain these outbreaks, to communicate actions plans to the public, and to execute on actions designed to keep the public healthy. Trump, RFK Jr., and the health agencies they’re in charge of are barely talking about this. They are ignoring the problem and that will ensure that it becomes much, much worse.
Impeachments are what’s necessary here, starting with Kennedy, who is clearly asleep at the wheel. A feckless Congress unwilling to do its job should have members tossed out on their ass. Staff at HHS and its child agencies should be in full revolt, sounding the alarm.
Measles is no fucking joke, folks. But our government currently is.
Meet the new year, same as the old year, at least as far as America’s measles problem goes. We talked a lot about this disease last year, and for good reason. In RFK Jr.’s first year as Secretary of HHS, America managed to suffer its worst measles infection count since 1991. A direct product of the anti-vaxxer bullshit Kennedy and his followers have been pushing for years, America collected 2,144 confirmed cases of measles in 2025. That number is certainly an under-count, with who knows how many undiagnosed cases existing out there. Three people, including two otherwise healthy children, died. America is all but certain to have lost its elimination status of the disease. Of all the gravel-mouthed words that spilled out of Kennedy’s mouth in 2025, there were relatively few of them reserved for this highly contagious and deadly disease that is now circulating via various outbreaks in the country who’s health he’s in charge of managing.
The start of 2026 is likely to set us up for an even worse year for measles than the last. Over 5% of the total infections of measles in 2025 were reported in the last week of the year or so. It’s not slowing down. This disaster of a train may be still pulling out of the station, but it’s picking up speed. And while the CDC’s measles website, linked above, isn’t updated more than once a week at most, health officials are reporting a ton of infections in the ongoing South Carolina outbreak alone.
In a regularly scheduled update this afternoon, the health department said 99 cases were identified since Tuesday, bringing the outbreak total to 310 cases. There are currently 200 people in quarantine and nine in isolation. However, the outbreak is expanding so quickly and with so many exposure sites that health officials are struggling to trace cases and identify people at risk.
“An increasing number of public exposure sites are being identified with likely hundreds more people exposed who are not aware they should be in quarantine if they are not immune to measles,” Linda Bell, state epidemiologist and the health department’s incident commander for the measles outbreak, said in the announcement. “Previous measles transmission studies have shown that one measles case can result in up to 20 new infections among unvaccinated contacts.”
It’s not just the unvaccinated any longer. As 2025 went on, we began to see an uptick in what are called “breakthrough cases.” Health professionals who know what they’re talking about will tell you that 2 doses of the MMR vaccine are roughly 97% effective in preventing a measles infection. That leaves 3% of people exposed at a minimum and that’s before we get into the discussion of how that number is impacted the lower we get from the 95% immunization target to achieve true herd immunity. And if you followed the reported infection statistics throughout last year as I did, you saw the percentage of infections occurring among those that had gotten either 1 or 2 doses of the MMR vaccine increase.
At the end of the year, 3% of the infected had had one dose of the MMR vaccine, and 4% had two doses. Early in the year, those were hovering between 1% and 2% and then grew. Responsible people who protected not only themselves but their fellow citizens by doing the right thing and getting their shots were put at risk and infected by those who didn’t. This failure of civil responsibility once again went largely unchallenged by RFK Jr. because of some combination of lunacy and his own financial interests.
And the real fun hasn’t even begun yet. Measles is crazy infectious and likes to hide its contagious nature early in the infection, not to mention that the disease causes immunity amnesia for all kinds of other diseases, making those infected susceptible to all kinds of diseases despite inoculation, such as chickenpox and COVID19.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which only has data as of January 6, has tallied three confirmed cases for this year (two in South Carolina and one in North Carolina, linked to the South Carolina outbreak). Since then, South Carolina reported 26 cases on Tuesday and 99 today, totaling 125. North Carolina also reported three additional cases Tuesday, again linked to the South Carolina outbreak. In all, that brings the US tally to at least 131 just nine days into the year.
Do the math. Even if we pretend for a moment that infectious diseases like measles don’t work on an exponential schedule, we’re already on pace for well over 5,000 measles infections this year. Unless something is done, it will be many, many more cases than that. And a possible resurgence of COVID19, something to which I really did think Trump would be particularly allergic.
Unfortunately, rationality appears to have gone out of style. Replaced, I suppose, by a facial rash that then descends into further complications.
I’m certain some people are getting tired of this refrain, but I’m going to keep repeating it to make the point: we shouldn’t have to talk about measles in this country in 2025. This is a disease that had been officially put in elimination status for America over two decades ago. We were done with this, thanks in large part to a dedicated campaign of MMR vaccinations and a government that advocated for those same vaccinations. It was after that when the anti-vaxxer campaigns really began to spring up. RFK Jr. was, of course, one of, if not the, leading voices in that movement.
Now that he is in charge of American health, I suppose it’s not surprising to see measles included in a number of diseases that are raging when they shouldn’t be. We recently talked about an outbreak currently going in South Carolina, which itself originated from the Texas outbreak earlier in the year. Well, that outbreak is getting worse, and health officials are suggesting it will continue getting even worse for some time.
A measles outbreak that began in South Carolina at the start of October is showing no signs of slowing as officials on Tuesday reported 27 new cases since Friday. Those cases bring the outbreak total to 111.
In an update on Tuesday, South Carolina’s health department suggested the spread is far from over. Of the state’s 27 new cases, 16 were linked to exposure at a church, the Way of Truth Church in Inman. And amid the new cases, new exposures were identified at Inman Intermediate School. That’s on top of exposures announced Friday at four other schools in the region, which led to well over 100 students being quarantined.
The end result is that there are, as of this writing, over 250 people quarantining. All of them reportedly are both unvaccinated for measles and have been recently exposed to the disease. If any appreciable percentage of those in quarantine end up ill, and I have no doubt that will happen, it could mean that there is a much larger pre-symptom spread that occurred, which itself will lead to even more infections. That how infectious diseases work, after all, and there are few if any diseases as infectious as measles.
And these are, of course, in counties and areas where there are both relatively low vaccination rates and a very high rate of those seeking religious exemptions from vaccination requirements.
The two counties’ low vaccination rates are coupled with high rates of religious exemptions. Spartanburg has the state’s highest rate, with 8.2 percent of students exempt from the school vaccination requirement based on religious beliefs. Neighboring Greenville has a religious vaccination exemption rate of 5.3 percent.
It’s very interesting just how much one god or another enjoys infecting their believers with measles.
This continues to be a problem nation wide. We’re quickly approaching 2,000 (!!!!!) confirmed cases of measles this year, blowing past total case counts for the last several decades. More undiagnosed cases certainly exist. We’re going to blow way past that 2,000 number as well, in no small part thanks to this outbreak in South Carolina.
Measles is a horrible disease. Just get your damned shots.
Measles is so back, baby! I know, you had thought we were done talking about this vile disease. After all, the outbreak that started in Texas among communities that are relatively unvaccinated finally slowed down at the tail end of the summer. That came after that outbreak almost single-handedly generated more cases of measles in America than had occurred since 1992, as well as caused three deaths. This all occurred under the watch of RFK Jr. as head of HHS. Kennedy is largely responsible for the disease’s return, thanks to his long anti-vaccine advocacy and due to his direct mismanagement of the measles outbreaks. He also blames the victims of the disease, too.
Those who wanted to cover for Kennedy and the Trump administration attempted to point to the Texas outbreak starting before Trump was in office. That’s both not really true and besides the point since the explosion of cases happened well into the year, but it’s also a moot point since there are more outbreaks than just that one. 44 outbreaks, in fact, according to the CDC, compared with only 16 outbreaks in all of 2024. And, as always, the cases largely effect children and the unvaccinated.
And to give you yet another real world example of how this is all playing out, an outbreak is South Carolina has resulted in the necessary quarantining of 150 children due to their being unvaccinated.
Last week, officials in Greenville identified an eighth measles case that is potentially linked to the outbreak. Seven outbreak cases had been confirmed since September 25 in neighboring Spartanburg, where transmission was identified in two schools: Fairforest Elementary and Global Academy, a public charter school.
Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.
As the ArsTechnica post goes on to note, Spartanburg has more unvaccinated children as a result of religious exemption than anywhere else in the state. South Carolina as a whole used to have the 95%+ vaccination rate that experts indicate provides the kind of herd immunity that keeps everyone safe, but that has dropped in the past several years to 93.7%. That might not seem like a big deal, but it is. And it’s even worse nation-wide when it comes to school-aged children.
The latest data indicates that the MMR vaccination coverage for US kindergartners was just 92.5 percent in the 2024–2025 school year, down from 95.2 percent in 2019–2020. Non-medical exemptions are now at 3.4 percent, an all-time high.
I am confident that any Almighty that may exist, and certainly any one worth believing in, doesn’t want you to get measles. If we don’t reverse the trend on our MMR vaccination rates, these outbreaks will continue to sprout up and more people will become infected. Eventually more of them will die.
But I don’t see that trend reversing while RFK Jr. is still in charge of American healthcare.
The bills were good and popular, generally. And by and large, Republicans voted against both of them. Yet Republicans will repeatedly take credit for the impact of both bills when talking to their constituents. I’ve lost track of the Republican reps, senators, and governors who have taken credit for ARPA improvements in local communities (especially broadband).
One major reason Republicans get away with this kind of lying is we’ve let policymakers and corporations eviscerate local news at the hands of mindless consolidation and the extraction class. Neither the hedge-fund hollowed husk of your local paper or right-wing fake broadcast news machines like Sinclair broadcasting are going to clearly tell the South Carolina public that Mace is lying.
“They can just go online to get the truth,” I hear someone say, ignoring that 54 percent of U.S. adults operate at or below a 6th grade reading level, and the internet has been actively been filled with badly automated bullshit and propaganda at a scale never before seen in human history.
The national media generally finds infrastructure boring because it doesn’t get clicks. And when they do press lawmakers like Mace on these kinds of lies, like CNN tried to do, politicians like Mace will just lie some more without any press follow up.
For example, at a recent South Carolina town hall, Mace again not only lied and insisted she was directly responsible for getting the $195 million infrastructure bill money needed for traffic improvements, the media was somehow covering up her involvement:
“One of the things the press will not tell you: I am one of the leading members of Congress who’s gotten resources for our state,” Mace said. “In fact, our office assisted in getting the largest infrastructure grant in South Carolina history, at $195 million earlier this year. The press won’t tell you that.”
When someone from CNN tried to press Mace on that lie, she lied some more, insisting that she deserves credit because she later injected herself into the spending process:
“We fight over how we spend the money, how we appropriate it, but once the appropriations happen, I’m gonna make sure that South Carolina, that we get our fair share, because that money’s getting spent and our tax dollars in South Carolina is equal to anybody else’s in California, New York, Tennessee.”
Except when MAGA Republicans get involved in infrastructure bill spending fights, they routinely make things worse. Case in point: Republicans are effectively rewriting the part of the infrastructure bill that doles out $42.5 billion in broadband grants to not only eliminate affordability and equality requirements, but to try and slather Elon Musk with undeserved taxpayer subsidies, making the resulting broadband more expensive and shittier.
So no, voting against a bill, undermining the bill at every opportunity, then later injecting yourself into the process (in a way that, at best, probably didn’t actually help anybody) doesn’t really qualify as helping your constituents, unfortunately. With a lot of the infrastructure bill funding still slowly winding its way to the states, you’re going to see a lot more extremist MAGA lawmakers taking credit for policies they not only voted against, but repeatedly tried to undermine.
This isn’t helped by Dem lawmakers that lack the messaging competency to take loud (and annoyingly repetitive) credit for the successful policies they push. I study broadband access for a living, see first hand the direct good ARPA is doing for access, but between woeful Dem messaging and a broken press, I’m hard pressed to find voters who actually know why a local project happened and how it got funded.
That creates a vacuum for opportunistic liars like Mace to stumble into without much serious effort.
Even though Trump says it’s about the crime rates, it’s not actually about the crime rates.
Just like he used the hallucination that the entirety of Los Angeles was under siege by “violent” protesters to justify sending in the troops, the reality was that any violence was contained to a few small blocks in the city. Furthermore, most of the violence was being committed by law enforcement officers. Finally, even local law enforcement officials saw no need to add National Guard troops and Marines to the mix because they already had everything under control.
The same game plan has gone into effect in Washington D.C. After some punk kid hired by Musk’s DOGE squad got rumbled by a couple of teens, Trump declared the city lawless and took direct control of policing the District of Columbia with a hodgepodge mix of whatever federal law enforcement officers hadn’t already been deputized by ICE to detain ice cream vendors, meatpackers, and day laborers. Added to that unheady brew of g-men? 800 National Guard troops.
Because the people who love Trump suck as much as Trump does, politicians are aiding and abetting martial law implementation simply because the Big Man asked.
Three Republican-led states, responding to a Trump administration request, said Saturday they will send up to 750 National Guard troops to join 800 already mobilized in D.C.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said he would deploy 200 troops “to stand with President Trump as he works to restore law and order to our nation’s capital.” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he was sending 150 military police from the state’s National Guard. The Ohio Guard members are expected to arrive to D.C. in the coming days, DeWine said in a statement.
They followed West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who said 300 to 400 National Guard troops would be called up.
Well, I guess do whatever you think might earn you Trump’s endorsement/derision over the remainder of your career. It’s not like Trump hasn’t turned on his most vehement supporters for the pettiest of reasons in the past. And, by all means, ignore the crime happening in your own jurisdiction.
This isn’t because there’s no crime in D.C. to combat (of course there is, as the right-wing media insists one acknowledge) but because the mission as established by President Trump isn’t really about that. Crime is simply the pretext Trump is using to put into effect his long-standing desire to deploy troops on the streets of D.C. Maybe it’s a lingering frustration from what happened in 2020; maybe it’s about pressing his thumb down on a city that voted heavily against him. Either way, it is not centrally about crime.
Because Trump is championing this deployment, his supporters are treating it as necessary and brilliant. And that, in turn, is triggering GOP politicians to start another scramble onto another bandwagon. Hence the deployments from Republican governors in Republican states: They get to say that they helped Trump do the thing that Trump told his base needed to be done. And here we are.
As the FBI’s own crime data points out, Washington D.C.’s crime rates have returned to historic lows, following an uptick in 2020 (when Trump was still president!) amid large-scale disruption created by a worldwide pandemic.
None of this matters to Trump. And none of this matters to the first Republican governors willing to send their own off to Washington D.C. to stand around looking useless while crime continues to remain at historic lows.
Meanwhile, on the home front, there’s plenty of actual crime that’s essentially being ignored by these performative losers. As Bump’s infographics — taken directly from FBI crime rate data — show, these governors might have been better off sending the National Guard into some of their own cities. More than a few have violent crime rates close to, or surpassing, the crime rate in D.C. that has Trump all hot and bothered.
Anything in pink is a city that has a higher violent crime rate per capita than Washington D.C. And the maps Bump has included in his post are interactive, so you can fact-check them yourself, should you feel compelled to do so. Certainly, no one in the White House is concerned with actual facts. This is all a performance.
And it’s a performance Trump wants to extend past Los Angeles and Washington D.C. He has made vague statements about sending the military into any city or state he doesn’t feel is run by loyalists. Of course, he claims it’s all about crime, but the facts aren’t going to simply vanish just because Trump (and his acolytes)[and his MAGA fans] refuses to acknowledge them.
Following his military incursion into the D.C. area, Trump threatened similar things may be happening soon in Los Angeles (where it already has happened), Baltimore, Oakland, New York, and Chicago. According to this oratorical genius, all of these cities are “bad, very bad.”
The facts say otherwise. (I mean… I guess? How do you directly contradict “bad, very bad?”)
In Oakland, all violent crime has dropped 19% since last year. Homicides are down 32% and robberies decreased 24%. In Chicago, crime rates have fallen 15% since 2023, with murder being down 37%.
Baltimore’s violent crime rate has decreased 17% since last year, and even more since 2020, despite the implementation of “liberal” policies the Trump administration continues to claim (without any facts in evidence) have turned Baltimore into an unlivable nightmare of constant criminal violence.
The same goes for New York City, which has seen a crime rate decrease as well, despite being hampered by a mayor who thinks it’s time to go back to “broken windows” policing, which will apparently be overseen by any number of city and law enforcement officials who were investigated for corruption. (And that includes the mayor.)
None of this is about crime. It’s just another show of force from a megalomaniac who loves cheap, meaningless “wins” and being catered to by an entire cadre of cabinet members and advisors who couldn’t find a spine if you trapped them in an ossuary. (Which is something we, the people, should definitely consider doing.)
It’s a stunt presidency that’s doing actual lasting damage to this nation, democracy, and everything a lot of people claimed they stood for before they started voting for Trump. There’s a nation to be had here, but we should be the ones taking it, rather than sitting by while it’s taken from us. Every fact matters, even if this administration refuses to engage with them. Journalists like Bump are doing what needs to be done. While everyone understands this “bad, very bad” shit is performative, it takes a concentrated effort to ensure it never becomes uncontested.
The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.
The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.
Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.
Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.
Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.
“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”
The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.
The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.
The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.
The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.
“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.
A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.
The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.
In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”
A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.
Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.
“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”
“I Lost Everything”
In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.
Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.
He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.
Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.
“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.
Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.
Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”
“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.
Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.
“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.
Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.
William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.
“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”
Trapped in Group Homes
South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.
After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.
The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.
South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.
Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.
Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.
“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.
South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.
After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.
South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.
His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.
Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.
“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”
