When the Techdirt community has had to hear so much about a single state’s education superintendent, you know something has gone horribly wrong. The horribly wrong in this case is Ryan Walters of Oklahoma. Walters appears to be doing some sort of combo-impression of Joseph McCarthy mixed with Donald Trump. In his role running Oklahoma schools, which rank near the bottom of states in the country, he seems far more interested in inserting Christianity anywhere he can into public schools, teaching children his favorite pet election conspiracy theories, and presiding over board meetings where tame but very strange erotic videos sometimes appear on screens.
Much of this runs afoul of the Constitution and the First Amendment, of course. And I very much wonder if the same might be true of Walters’ latest plan, which is to give transplants from certain states who want to become teachers in Oklahoma a “woke test” that will determine if they get a teaching license.
Teachers from “liberal” states who have relocated to Oklahoma and are seeking to work there must take a controversial new assessment, to be given for the first time today, that “keeps away woke indoctrinators,” according to Oklahoma’s top education official.
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent for public instruction, told CNN that if applicants do not pass the test, they will not earn a teaching certificate to be able to teach in public schools in the state this school year, which begins for some Oklahoma districts on Monday. The superintendent’s office notified CNN on Friday that it had not yet been released as of noon, but that it was coming soon.
Now, I’m no constitutional law professor, but this sure sounds like the state government would be setting different requirements for different citizens purely based on the place in America from which they are emigrating. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I, and others, can certainly argue that these selective tests run afoul of that text. And I imagine someone will try to make that argument or another one, such as First Amendment violations, because this entire plan is buckets of stupid. At the very least, this well-publicized plan to root out the nefarious Marxist teachers from “liberal” states, whatever the fuck that means, apparently hinges on the idea that those same nefarious Marxist teachers won’t simply lie on the test.
A test that was created by Prager U of all organizations, mind you. Not the government. Not some scholastic body. Just a fake educational organization that pushes evangelical right-wing propaganda to anyone that will listen. Prager U has its own tortured history of trying to violate the First Amendment on top of its other nonsense.
What’s in the test? Simple civics stuff, for starters, with just a sprinkle of bigotry on top.
One proposed question deals with gender – asking teachers to select from a series of multiple-choice answers which chromosome pairs determine biological sex. Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, told CNN there are several questions on the test related to “undoing the damage of gender ideology that is forced and taught through some of these other tests like the PRISM test,” referring to a training for teachers in California that aims to “provide resources to bolster support for LGBTQ+ youth in California.”
Another question asks why freedom of religion is important to America’s identity. Other questions include asking for the first three words of the Constitution, naming the two chambers of the US Congress, and identifying the number of US Senators. Streit said the Oklahoma superintendent had asked for a test “that is more wholesome and in line with the Oklahoma parent body.”
Expect lawsuits. Probably several of them. And if the Oklahoma courts are just, this facade of patriotism will be nixed out of existence.
But that it is even being tried is a sign of trouble for the Union.
Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically stupid idea—the kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a tabloid headline but crumbles under any serious scrutiny. Over and over again studies have found that social media is neither good nor bad for most teens. It’s also good for some—especially those who are in need of finding community or like-minded individuals. It is, also, not so great for a small group of kids, though the evidence there suggests that it’s worst for those dealing with untreated mental health issues, which causes them to use social media as an alternative to help.
There remains little to no actual evidence that an outright ban will be helpful, and plenty to suggest it will be actively harmful to many.
But now Australia has decided to double down on the stupid, announcing that YouTube will be included in the ban. This escalation reveals just how disconnected from reality this entire policy framework has become. We’ve gone from “maybe we should protect kids from social media” to “let’s ban children from accessing one of the world’s largest repositories of educational content.”
Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge.
The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last week to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site.
This is painfully stupid and ignorant. The claim that 37% of minors reported seeing harmful content is also… meaningless without a lot more context and details. What counts as “harmful”? A swear word? Political content their parents disagree with? A video explaining evolution? What was the impact? Is this entirely self-reported? What controls were there? Just saying 37% is kind of meaningless without the details.
This is vibes-based policymaking dressed up in statistics. You could probably get 37% of kids to report “harmful content” on PBS Kids if you asked them vaguely enough. The fact that Australia’s internet regulator is using this kind of methodological garbage to reshape internet policy tells you everything you need to know about how seriously they’ve thought this through.
But also, YouTube is not just effectively the equivalent of television for teens today—it’s often far superior to traditional television because it’s not gatekept by media conglomerates with their own agendas. The idea that you should need to be 16 years old to watch some YouTube programs is beyond laughable, especially given the amount of useful educational content on YouTube. These days there are things like Complexly, Khan Academy, Mark Rober, and plenty of other educational content that kids love and which lives on YouTube. Kids are learning calculus from 3Blue1Brown, exploring history through Crash Course, and getting better science education from YouTube creators than from most traditional textbooks. This isn’t just entertainment—it’s democratized education that bypasses the gatekeeping of traditional media entirely.
This isn’t just unworkable—it’s the construction of a massive censorship infrastructure that will inevitably be used for purposes far beyond “protecting children.” Once you’ve built the system to block kids from YouTube, you’ve built the system to block anyone from anything. And that system will be irresistible to future governments with different ideas about what content people need to be “protected” from.
And the Australian government already knows that age verification tech is a privacy and security nightmare. They admitted as much two years ago.
Of course, kids will figure out ways around it anyway. VPNs exist. Older friends exist. Parents who aren’t idiots exist—and they’ll help their kids break this law. The only thing this accomplishes is teaching an entire generation that their government’s laws are arbitrary, unenforceable, and fundamentally disconnected from reality. It’s teaching kids to have less respect for government.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. Australia is part of a broader global trend of governments using “protect the children” rhetoric as cover for internet control. The UK’s porn age verification disaster, the US Kids Online Safety Act, similar proposals across Europe—they all follow the same playbook. Identify a genuine concern (kids sometimes see stuff online that isn’t great for them), propose a solution that sounds reasonable in a headline (age limits!), then implement it through surveillance and censorship infrastructure that can be repurposed for whatever moral panic comes next.
The end result will be that Australia has basically taught a generation of teenagers not to trust the government, that their internet regulators are completely out of touch, and that laws are stupid. But it goes deeper than that. This kind of blatantly unworkable policy doesn’t just breed contempt for specific laws—it undermines the entire concept of legitimate governance. When laws are this obviously disconnected from technological and social reality, it signals that the people making them either don’t understand what they’re regulating or don’t care about whether their policies actually work. It’s difficult to see how that benefits anyone at all.
The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.
ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.
Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.
Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.
The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after President Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.
In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.
“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”
In the past, when law enforcement sought IRS data to support its investigations, agencies would give the IRS the full legal name of the target, an address on file and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal inquiry. Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time, former IRS officials said.
Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, said the privacy laws allowing federal investigators to obtain taxpayer data have never “been read to open the door to the sharing of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tax records for a broad-based enforcement initiative.”
A spokesperson for the White House said the planned use of IRS data was legal and a means of fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of “illegal criminal aliens.”
Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.
The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.
“If this program is implemented in its current form, it’s extremely likely that incorrect addresses will be given to DHS and individuals will be wrongly targeted,” said an IRS engineer who examined the blueprints and who, like other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The dispute that ended in De Mello’s ouster was the culmination of months of pressure on the IRS to turn over massive amounts of data in ways that would redefine the relationship between the agency and law enforcement and reduce taxpayers’ privacy, records and interviews show.
In one meeting in late March between senior IRS and DHS officials, a top ICE official made a suggestion: Why doesn’t Homeland Security simply provide the name and state of its targets and have the IRS return the addresses of everyone who matches that criteria?
The IRS lawyers were stunned. They feared they could face criminal liability if they handed over the addresses of individuals who were not under a criminal investigation. The conversation and news of deeper collaboration with ICE so disturbed career staff that it led to a series of departures in late March and early April across the IRS’ legal, IT and privacy offices.
They were “pushing the boundaries of the law,” one official said. “Everyone at IRS felt the same way.”
The Blueprint
The technical blueprint obtained by ProPublica shows that engineers at the agency are preparing to give DHS what it wants: a system that enables massive automated data sharing. The goal is to launch the new system before the end of July, two people familiar with the matter said.
The DHS effort to obtain IRS data comes as top immigration enforcement leaders face escalating White House pressure to deport some 3,000 people per day, according to reports.
One federal agent tasked with assisting ICE on deportations said recent operations have been hamstrung by outdated addresses. Better information could dramatically speed up arrests. “Some of the leads that they were giving us were old,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “They’re like from two administrations ago.”
In early March, immigrants rights groups sued the IRS hoping to block the plan, arguing that the memorandum of understanding between DHS and the IRS is illegal. But a judge in early May ruled against them, saying the broader agreement complied with Section 6103, the existing law regulating IRS data sharing. That opened the door for engineers to begin building the system.
The judge did not address the technical blueprint, which didn’t exist at the time of the ruling. But the case is pending, which means the new system could still come under legal review.
Until now, little was known about the push and pull between the two agencies or the exact technical mechanics behind the arrangement.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy even within the IRS, with details of its development withheld from regular communications. Several IRS engineers and lawyers have avoided working on the project out of concerns about personal legal risk.
Asked about the new system, a spokesperson for IRS parent agency the Treasury Department said the memorandum of understanding, often called an MOU, “has been litigated and determined to be a lawful application of Section 6103, which provides for information sharing by the IRS in precise circumstances associated with law enforcement requests.”
At a time when Trump is making threats to deport not only undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens, the scope of information-sharing with the IRS could continue to grow, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and sources familiar with the matter: DHS has been looking for ways to expand the agreement that could allow Homeland Security officials to seek IRS data on Americans being investigated for various crimes.
Last month, an ICE attorney proposed updating the MOU to authorize new data requests on people “associated with criminal activities which may include United States citizens or lawful permanent residents,” according to a document seen by ProPublica. The status of this proposal is unclear. De Mello, at the time, rejected it and called for senior Treasury Department leadership to personally sign off on such a significant change.
The White House described DHS’ work with the IRS as a good-faith effort to identify and deport those who are living in the country illegally.
“ProPublica continues to degrade their already terrible reputation by suggesting we should turn a blind eye to criminal illegal aliens present in the United States for the sake of trying to collect tax payments from them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement after receiving questions about the blueprint from ProPublica.
She pointed to the April MOU as giving the government the authority to create the new system and added, “This isn’t a surveillance system. … It’s part of President Trump’s promise to carry out the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens — the promise that the American people elected him on and he is committed to fulfilling.”
In a separate statement, a senior DHS official also cited the court’s approval of the MOU, saying that it “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”
How the System Works
The new system would represent a sea change, allowing law enforcement to request enormous swaths of confidential data in bulk through an automated, computerized process.
The system, according to the blueprint and interviews with IRS engineers, would work like this:
First, DHS would send the IRS a spreadsheet containing the names and previous addresses of the people it’s targeting. The request would include the date of a final removal order, a relevant criminal statute ICE is using to investigate the individual, and the tax period for which information is sought. If DHS fails to include any of this information, the system would reject the request.
The system then attempts to match the information provided by the DHS to a specific taxpayer identification number, which is the primary method by which the IRS identifies an individual in its databases.
If the system makes a match, it accesses the individual’s associated tax file and pulls the address listed during the most recent tax period. Then the system would produce a new spreadsheet enriched with taxpayer data that contains DHS’ targets’ last known addresses. The spreadsheet would include a record of names rejected for lack of required information and names for which it could not make a match.
Tax and privacy experts say they worry about how such a powerful yet crude platform could make dangerous mistakes. Because the search starts with a name instead of a taxpayer identification number, it risks returning the address of an innocent person with the same name as or a similar address to that of one of ICE’s targets. The proposed system assumes the data provided by DHS is accurate and that each targeted individual is the subject of a valid criminal investigation. In effect, the IRS has no way to independently check the bases of these requests, experts told ProPublica.
In addition, the blueprint does not limit the amount of data that can be transferred or how often DHS can request it. The system could easily be expanded to acquire all the information the IRS holds on taxpayers, said technical experts and IRS engineers who reviewed the documents. By shifting a single parameter, the program could return more information than just a target’s address, said an engineer familiar with the plan, including employer and familial relationships.
Engineers based at IRS offices in Lanham, Maryland, and Dallas are developing the blueprint.
“Gone Back on Its Word”
For decades, the American government has encouraged everyone who makes an income in the U.S. to pay taxes — regardless of immigration status — with an implicit promise that their information would be protected. Now that same data may be used to locate and deport noncitizens.
“For years, the IRS has told immigrants that it only cares that they pay their taxes,” said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is seeking to block the data-sharing agreement in federal court. “By agreeing to share taxpayer data with ICE on a mass basis, the IRS has gone back on its word.”
The push to share IRS data with DHS emerged while Elon Musk’s DOGE reshaped the engineering staff of the IRS. Sam Corcos, a Silicon Valley startup founder with no government experience, pushed out more than 50 IRS engineers and restructured the agency’s engineering priorities while he was the senior DOGE official at the agency. He later became chief information officer at Treasury. He has also led a separate IRS effort to create a master database using products from Silicon Valley giant Palantir Technologies, enabling the government to link and search large swaths of data.
Corcos didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House said DOGE is not part of the DHS-IRS pact.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees the IRS, told ProPublica the system being built was ripe for abuse. It “would allow an outside agency unprecedented access to IRS records for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, opening the door to endless fishing expeditions,” he said.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the department’s internal watchdog, is already probing efforts by Trump and DOGEto obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, ProPublica reported in April.
The Trump administration continues to add government agencies to its deportation drive.
DOGE and DHS are also working to build a national citizenship database, NPR reported last month. The database links information from the Social Security Administration and the DHS, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing state and local election officials to verify U.S. citizenship.
And in May, a senior Treasury Department official directed 250 IRS criminal investigative agents to help deportation operations, a significant shift for two agencies that historically have had separate missions.
As RFK Jr. has presided over the decimation of the Health & Human Services department he runs, along with HHS’ child agencies, his anti-vaxxer stance has shown through. And, really, his appointment, confirmation, and subsequent actions should fully put to bed any question of the utility of congressional approval of cabinet positions. During those hearings, in which Kennedy spent most of the time either refusing to answer perfectly legitimate questions or else demonstrating that he had zero understanding how the programs he would be running actually work and are funded, Kennedy also voiced his support for vaccines generally, particularly for children. This flew in the face of the decades Kennedy has spent blaming vaccines for autism rates increasing, among other things. The consequences for what was a spectacular fail-job of a confirmation hearing was his appointment to Secretary of HHS.
Since his confirmation, Kennedy has helpfully put his incompetence on full display. He has bungled a measles outbreak that is the 2nd largest in three decades and still expanding, prattled on about chemtrails, committed to knowing the cause of autism this year only to walk that back, and at least attempted to pull back CDC guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for children and pregnant women. All of this should have laid to bare for government leaders that Kennedy is anti-science, anti-vaccine, and grossly incompetent to run a small medical clinic, never mind HHS.
But in case you needed an example the contrast turned all the way to 100%, Kennedy this week decided to fire every single member of the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. This decision was announced not in a press conference, nor in a congressional hearing, but by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
In an opinion piece published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy announced that he had cleared out the committee, accusing them of being “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and a group that has “become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy added.
The committee—CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—meets periodically to publicly review, evaluate, debate, and make recommendations on immunization practices. The CDC typically adopts the committee’s recommendations. The CDC’s vaccination schedules and recommendations set clinical standards for the country and determine insurance coverage.
The group is pretty damned important, in other words, when it comes to how the CDC, clinicians, and insurance companies throughout the country organized their parts of various vaccination programs throughout the country. Programs that Kennedy has historically railed against, regularly engaging in conspiracy theories. And you really do have to couple this news with Kennedy’s rejection of the germ theory of disease, which has been powering modern medicine for the past century or so. Put more simply: a man who has spent decades railing against modern vaccine practices and who rejects the cornerstone of modern medicine conducted his own less directly violent version of the Comrade’s Massacre, with the public ouster of these experts coupled with a public declaration of their being unfit to serve.
If you think that comparison is too harsh, you aren’t paying attention to the authoritarian playbook, which Kennedy has obviously adopted. Worse than accusing ACIP members of being purposefully corrupt, Kennedy outlines why they simply can’t help but be corrupted. There’s no agency in any of this among those he ousted. They are corrupt by a combination of any connection Kennedy could draw to the medical industry and his own declaration that they are so.
In Kennedy’s article, he criticized ACIP and FDA advisors for being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. However, he argued that the “problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt.”
“Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it,” he wrote. “The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.”
In Kennedy’s op-ed, he indicates that new ACIP members will be appointed who “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. … will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry.”
Read all of this any way you like, but it’s fairly straight forward. Kennedy thinks that ACIP was working for the big pharma industry against the interests of the American people and their health, particularly when it comes to all things vaccines. He purged them and will replace them with his own hand-picked advisors that will almost certainly be plagued by similar misguided views. And that group, currently populated by nobody at all, will meet in 2 weeks to talk about immunization programs according to Kennedy.
Critics of this purge abound, as you would expect. And, because they come from the very medical experts and industries that Kennedy claims are conspiring against us all in order to, I guess, sell vaccines, they can be easily dismissed by his cadre of sycophants.
Kennedy’s move was quickly rebuked by a number of doctors groups. A statement released by the American Medical Association said it “upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives.” The American Academy of Pediatrics called it part of an “escalating effort by the Administration to silence independent medical expertise and stoke distrust in lifesaving vaccines.”
“This is horrifying,” a CDC official said of Kennedy’s move.
The American Public Health Association denounced it as an undemocratic “coup” of the process. The Infectious Disease Society of America called it “reckless, shortsighted and severely harmful.” The American College of Physicians accused Kennedy of having “circumvented the standard, transparent vaccine review processes” at the CDC.
If you thought that Kennedy would be allowed to retain his position, one for which he is hopelessly unqualified, and the extent of the fallout from it would be a mere measles outbreak, conspiracy talk, and maybe a handful of dead bodies, it really could get so, so much worse than that. A change in the government’s immunization guidance that deviates from actual medical science can’t help but filter down to some percentage of doctors and the public.
And people will get sick, and indeed some will die, as a result. In fact, that has already started to happen. The only question now is just how large a body count Kennedy will manage to rack up.
Fresh off of his Mother’s Day swim in a literal shit creek, RFK Jr. sat before House and Senate committees to answer questions about the impact of the proposed Trump budget on Health and Human Services (HHS), the cuts that have and are proposed further for HHS, and an explanation for why some programs are being saved while others are being cut. In his testimony, Kennedy advocated for the Republican budget, including those major cuts to his own ability to deliver on HHS’ mission.
Straight from the HHS website, here is its mission statement.
The mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.
That mission statement is obviously no longer valid. Like, at all. HHS certainly isn’t enhancing health anywhere at all compared to a couple of months ago. Social services and public health facilities are being cut back, not advanced. And the “sound science” bit? Miss me with that bullshit while RFK Jr. is leading the charge on American medicine and healthcare.
And it seems RFK Jr. agrees on that last point as well. Kennedy not only currently heads up HHS, but he has written several books on the topics of health, medicine, and healthcare over the years. They include titles like The Real Anthony Fauci, The Wuhan Cover-Up, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, and Profiles of the Vaccine Injured, among others. These all touch heavily upon medicine and healthcare, advising the reader as to the truth within medicine or advocating for one health policy or another.
Which makes it pretty fucking rich when Kennedy said this in response to a question about whether he would advocate for the public to get certain vaccinations in these same hearings.
“If you had a child today, would you vaccinate that child for measles?” began the Democratic congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin at the House appropriations committee hearing.
“For measles? Um, probably for measles,” said Kennedy, in one of the few hesitations of the hearing. “What I would say is my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant … I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking advice, medical advice, from me.”
On the one hand, hey, he finally said something medically sensible: don’t take advice from him. That’s, well, good advice. On the other hand, maybe it would be better if we had someone leading HHS who’s advice we could listen to? I know, crazy idea, but it just might work.
And given the volume of medical advice Kennedy has dispensed over the years, it’s both remarkable that he would make that statement and equally remarkable that he can’t manage to take any sort of stance on several medical questions in front of Congress.
Pocan went on to ask about chickenpox.
“Um, again, I don’t want to give advice,” Kennedy said, before commenting on shingles.
Pocan continued: “Polio?”
“Polio?” Kennedy said. “Again, I don’t want to be giving advice.”
The issued re-emerged in his afternoon testimony before the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, where the Democrat Chris Murphy asked Kennedy if he would recommend the measles vaccine. The secretary demurred, prompting Murphy to say: “I think that’s really dangerous for the American public and for families.
“The secretary of health and human services is no longer recommending the measles vaccines,” Murphy said.
Again, we’re in the middle of a ballooning measles outbreak in America and the Secretary of HHS can’t figure out a way to tell the public to get an MMR vaccine that is safe and effective. Good times.
There’s a long tail aspect to all of this. Even were Kennedy to be removed from his post today — a move that is so overly justified as to be laughable — the effects of his holding the position even these few months are going to be felt for decades, if not longer. There are already deaths at least partially on his hands. How long is the current administration really going to let this go on?
RFK Jr.’s tenure at HHS must be put to an end. We already have ample evidence for that necessity, both in the form of his complete mismanagement of a ballooning measles outbreak that continues to expand, his vaccine skepticism that has led to him stating that he’s going to have the origin of autism all figured out in a couple of months despite years of research from actually qualified people being done, or even just the fact that a goddamned worm ate part of his fucking brain.
But now this is just getting ridiculous. In the midst of the measles problem that he really should be focusing on combatting, Kennedy instead went on Dr. Phil’s show. There he took questions about health from the audience and, in response to one question, committed to getting to the bottom of this whole chemtrail thing.
Toward the end of Dr. Phil’s town hall, an audience member named Emily stated that she was most concerned about the constant “aerosol injections” of aluminum, strontium, and other purported toxins being sprayed into the skies—a statement that RFK Jr. completely took at face value when asked how he was going to address this issue.
“That is not happening in my agency. We don’t do that. It’s done, we think, by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel—so those materials are put in jet fuel,” Kennedy responded, appearing to blame the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, for chemtrails. DARPA has long been a conspiracy bogeyman, though it’s not the only government agency that’s been accused of creating chemtrails.
Kennedy added, “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable.”
Let that sink in for just a moment. As HHS has cut 1/8th of its workforce, including clinics and resources for fighting the measles outbreak, he is committing to bringing in a fulltime employee who will spend all of their time, all of it, “thinking only about” chemtrails. This isn’t just incompetence; it’s a criminal waste of taxpayer dollars, time, and energy on a conspiracy theory that many conspiracy theorists think is fucking stupid. Any brain cycles spent thinking about this by anyone is of zero value. And here is the head of healthcare in America not only taking it seriously, but promising to commit resources to it.
Even among conspiracy theories, the logic underlying chemtrails is especially stupid. The theory goes that planes have been secretly seeding the skies with all sorts of chemical weapons that have been poisoning people for decades—weapons that conveniently leave behind easily visible trails. Some people claim these chemicals are also—or instead—being used to modify the weather.
In truth, these trails are the product of condensation that usually happens when jet fuel exhaust—mostly made out of water vapor but also containing small particles of soot—mixes with cold, humid air at high altitudes. In other words, they’re basically just temporary clouds made out of ice crystals (natural clouds are more often composed of water droplets). They’re formally known as contrails, short for condensation trails.
And the head of HHS wants you to know he’s on the case. Because we’re apparently going to allow him to be and not impeach him or otherwise pressure the administration to put someone with a full intact brain in the position.
We probably don’t need to tell you that the current tariff situation is causing complete chaos in global supply chains, in large part due to the uncertainty — for all we know, the exact rules will have changed since this episode was recorded just yesterday. But we wanted to get some insight into the impact on small businesses, so this week we’re joined by Jesse Vincent, co-founder of Keyboardio (makers of one of Mike’s favorite keyboards, who recently wrote an open letter to their US customers), to talk about the challenge of running a business amidst Trump’s tariff chaos.
Instead of tackling any of this, new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent the lion’s share of his first months in office engaged in erratic authoritarian zealotry, whether it’s abusing FCC authority to harass journalists who refuse to kiss Donald Trump’s ass, or “investigating” Verizon, Comcast, and Disney for not being racist enough.
Now Carr is again taking aim at Comcast, simply because journalists at MSNBC and NBC gave King Donald a sad.
Over at the right wing propaganda website known as X, Carr whined about Comcast over MSNBC and NBC’s coverage of Abrego Garcia, a Maryland dad the government “accidentally” kidnapped, sent to a foreign gulag, and now refuses to return to the U.S.
You’ll notice Carr isn’t actually launching any sort of actual “investigation” into Comcast here because the accusation is baseless bullshit.
There is no evidence that Garcia was a gang member. Garcia’s only arrest was in 2019 for “loitering” in a Home Depot parking lot. Carr is of course mad because NBC and MSNBC told people the truth: that the government fucked up, appear to have falsely and lazily identified a man as a gang member and dangerous career criminal, then “accidentally” shipped him off to a foreign work gulag.
Even if Garcia was a gang member, Brendan Carr is behaving like a foolish clown. The rule he’s trying to leverage here, the FCC’s “distortion rule,” is a very rarely enforced rule that says news outlets can’t suppress important journalism or take cash bribes to modify journalism. It clearly doesn’t apply if NBC and MSNBC were just explaining the situation accurately. And it doesn’t apply to cable news.
Carr, of course, knows this, he’s just hoping that a shitty U.S. press system will help him pretend he’s launching a “serious investigation,” so the accusations get repeated across the media and other news outlets think twice before criticizing Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter if NBC (or anybody else) is guilty, the press will dutifully parrot the accusation far and wide, implying guilt.
Because U.S. consolidated corporate journalism is generally very shitty and concerned about losing access or costly fake investigations, it’s an effective tactic.
If you search through the news wires, most of the reporting on this story parrot Carr’s claims without pointing out he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Or that the rule in question doesn’t apply to cable. Or that Carr’s primary goal is very clearly to bully media companies and suppress journalism, a curious choice for a party that spent the last few years babbling endlessly about their love of free speech.
Again there will never be a case against Comcast here because this is thin bullshit and Carr has absolutely no leg to stand on. The whole point of the tweet was to get the press to parrot the false claims to a broader audience and to soften their criticism of the Trump administration. Most were happy to oblige.
I guess it’s good to know there are still surprises left for me in this universe. We have talked about the common absurdity in which video games are blamed for all manner of things. It’s the moral panic of our time. Video games are blamed for violence, for supposed addictions, for violence, for the eventual end to the human race due to men not dating enough, and also for violence. That list isn’t exhaustive, by the way. Plenty of other things are blamed on video games beyond those, but you get the idea.
Rarely, if ever, have I heard that video games are the reason there is so much waste in Medicaid, however. And, yet, that appears to be, at least in part, the exact theory House Speaker Mike Johnson is engaging in to justify the GOP cutting into the Medicaid program despite Dear Leader claiming his adoration for the program.
“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed—what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled. They’re draining resources from people,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson last week.
“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing videogames all day.”
Ah, the old “nerd in Mom’s basement” routine. How droll.
Meanwhile, here are some inconvenient facts. Medicaid is a program to essentially supplement health coverage for those that can’t otherwise afford it. Recent studies indicate that something like two-thirds of the folks on Medicaid are, in fact, already employed. The majority of those that are not are folks who are typically elderly, disabled, or have life circumstances precluding them from fulltime work, such as taking care of unwell family members that have nobody else to rely on.
Are there some in the program that are taking advantage of the system? Undoubtedly. That is surely the case in every sizable system everywhere, government or otherwise. But Johnson’s work requirement will do very little other than to put the sick and elderly in the crosshairs of a government that seems to believe cruelty is the chief mechanism for governance.
But these are, again, inconvenient facts that serve only to stand in the way of Johnson’s desire to hand-wave concerns about cutting this program by invoking the demon that is video games. It’s lazy. It’s cynical.
And it’s another proof that this current government thinks we’re too stupid to know when we’re being lied to.
In an unforced error that will only burnish ICE’s reputation for being a brawn operation that’s talked itself into believing it’s a brains operation, ICE briefly let the American public know it was no longer willing to let illegal ideas to enter (or even exit) the United States.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s job is to stop illegal ideas from crossing the U.S. border, according to a now-deleted social media post from the agency that drew condemnation on Thursday.
In a promotional graphic on X, ICE said they enforce over 400 federal laws to “ensure public safety and national security,” with the picture showing ICE will stop the crossings of people, money, products — and ideas. The post directs people to visit the ICE website.
Yeah, it actually said that. There are screenshots of it and everything.
Sure enough, the image posted on ICE’s official xTwitter account says:
If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it’s our job to STOP IT.
The list next to it reads:
People Money Products Ideas
Illegal ideas, eh? That’s a new one. ICE later walked back that post after being mocked and derided by nearly everyone who came across it, claiming its own official post was a mistake.
ICE told POLITICO that the post was put up in error, and that it is drafting a new post that will include “intellectual property” — not ideas.
That only makes it slightly less stupid.
First, it’s not a stretch to assume ICE is in the business of stopping “illegal” ideas at the border. ICE is soliciting offers for a social media dragnet that would, among other things, monitor the “total number of negative references to ICE found in social media.” Also, it would monitor whatever the hell this is:
Information indicating a potential for carrying out a threat (such as postings depicting weapons, acts of violence, refences to acts of violence, to include empathy or affiliation with a group which has violent tendencies; references to violent acts; affections with violent acts; eluding to violent acts, etc.).
Yes, that’s taken verbatim from ICE’s call for bids, one that makes it clear whoever (or whatever) wrote it believes “affection” should be accompanied by “with” and that it’s possible to “elude to” something rather than simply hope to avoid it completely.
On top of the that, Marco Rubio’s State Department is telling diplomats to scour social media posts and other online content created by visa applicants for the sole purpose of denying them entry if they show:
“a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles)”
Given that, it’s not ridiculous to take ICE at its word when it says (via tweet) that it’s going to prevent illegal “ideas” from entering this country.
Even if you take ICE at its post-ratio word, it’s still very stupid. First of all, ideas are not the same thing as intellectual property, as anyone who’s tried to patent or copyright an idea can attest. An idea alone is not protected by IP law.
Then there’s the absurd assertion that intellectual property respects physical borders. Just ask anyone downloading RARs from .tv domains. Just ask anyone who’s ever sent a PDF via email. The market for physical forms of copyright infringement is so small no one is really trying to sneak boxes of burned discs past customs authorities. Stopping “illegal” intellectual property at the border is a futile gesture at best. Anything that needs to get “into” the United States can be virtually tossed over the highest of walls and well over the heads of ICE officers staffing border crossings and international airports.
Whatever ICE actually meant is barely less stupid than what it actually said. And I, for one, am inclined to believe the agency truly thinks part of its job is being the literal thought police. Whatever it takes to deny someone entry and/or eject them from the country. And, for the moment, they’re all working for a man who truly believes any idea he doesn’t agree with is illegal or dangerous or both.
