Friday night we had dinner at Nina’s house, with most members of our little band of brothers there – that is, the group of . We are pretty much all die-hard conservatives and Christians. But there was a big Trump donor there, who truly believes that Trump’s promise of a $5,000 “dividend” will swing the midterms. Because MAGA will be thrilled by getting extra money- and it will swing the center voters, because it is all about the economy now. He was all over it – very passionate that this was Trump’s ticket to winning the midterms, having just met with various people in the Trump administration and having watched Trump’s speech in Texas. I was very skeptical of this, as were others, and we had a rather active discussion.
First, I did some research on recent polling: Trump has not lost his MAGA base, but the newest polling suggests that the broader coalition that carried him to victory in 2024 is beginning to fray. A September Quinnipiac poll found Trump still has 79% approval among Republicans, but only 62% strongly approve, while among independents his approval has fallen to just 22%, with 68% disapproving.
UMass Amherst provides an even clearer warning: the share of Republicans identifying with MAGA fell from 77% in March to 68% in August, while those saying they are “not at all” MAGA rose from 23% to 32%. Reuters/Ipsos likewise finds Trump’s overall approval around 33%, with an extraordinary 40% of Republicans disapproving of his handling of the cost of living.
The picture is therefore not one of a Republican revolt against Trump. The hard MAGA core remains remarkably loyal. Rather, the danger is that the outer ring of the Trump coalition, softer Republicans, independents, Latino swing voters, MAHA voters, and less-committed 2024 Trump voters, are peeling away, while enthusiasm (in other words, TDS) among Democrats is rising. In a midterm election, Trump does not need his base to switch parties to lose Congress. He merely needs enough of the voters who expanded his coalition in 2024 to stay home.
Then there is MAHA. There is no recent polling to show whether the Kennedy-to-Trump voters who joined the coalition in 2024 remain in 2026, particularly among independents and former Democrats. But I think the answer is obvious to those in the movement or who follow social media trends.
Anyway, back to Trump’s $5,000 dividend check…
There are no national polls on whether people support the idea of a dividend (i.e., a payment) to each adult in the USA for a whopping total of 1.2 trillion dollars. So we ran a poll on Robert’s X page.
Now, because of who follows that account, the responses are pretty much all Trump voters or ex-Trump voters (MAGA, MAHA, independents, and Conservatives). Almost ten thousand people voted. Here are the results.
One major theme emerged in the comments:
“I’ll add it to my tariff check money and my 5k child tax credit… Oh wait”
The other consensus from the comments was basically that of the fiscal conservative:
”We don’t want the government taking our money and giving it to other people.”
None of this is good news for the Midterm elections and, frankly, 2028.
The economy will not improve by November; the House is lost – all it takes is four seats to flip, and the GOP holding the Senate majority is up in the air.
The statistics aren’t on our side.
Since 1994, there have been six midterm elections in which one party entered Election Day holding majorities in both the House and Senate. In five of those six elections, that party lost control of the House.Democrats lost the House in 1994, 2010, and 2022; Republicans lost it in 2006 and 2018. The sole exception was 1998, when Republicans retained their House majority during Bill Clinton’s second term.
Put another way, since 1994, a party entering the midterms controlling both chambers of Congress has retained the House only once in six tries, a success rate of just 17 percent.
No amount of pandering to the American public about future $5,000.00 payments or dividends will change the forecast. Although it might cause some conservatives to sit this election out.
The hard lesson that Trump hasn’t learned in this election cycle is that he needs to turn to the right – and fast.
And fixing the economy is very different from promising to fix the economy when mid-term elections roll around.
Likewise, giving people money is very different than promising to give people money, when mid-term elections roll around.
People want to see results two years into a presidency.
At that dinner party last Friday, after all the talk about what the Trump administration has done wrong and how they could do better. We all came to one final thought:
We all have no choice but to get our asses out there and vote for the Republican candidate in November, cause what the left has done and will do to the country when they get power again is way worse!
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Two Americans can suffer serious injuries after receiving federally protected vaccines and find themselves in two entirely different systems of justice. One may enter a compensation program that has paid roughly half of the petitions it has adjudicated. The other may enter a program that has compensated fewer than one in a hundred decided COVID-19 vaccine claims. Neither person chose the system. Neither person was likely told there were two very different systems for vaccine injuries before rolling up a sleeve. Congress chose what compensation they would encounter if injured, years before either was injured. But neither are they told during the informed consent process that they would not be able to sue for damages in a regular court of law.
Those percentages are not abstract. Behind every petition is a person whose life may have divided into a before and an after: before the neurological injury, before the cardiac damage, before the chronic pain, before the inability to work, before a spouse became a full-time caregiver or parents began wondering who would care for their disabled child after they died. These people do not disappear because an agency rejects their claims. Their medical bills continue. Their lost income remains lost. Their marriages and families absorb the strain. The government merely moves them from a column labeled “pending” into one labeled “denied,” and Washington congratulates itself on having provided a remedy.
This is the story of a bargain Congress made with the American people in 1986 and quietly gutted in 2005. The original bargain was not perfect, but it recognized a basic moral fact: if government protects an industry by taking away an injured person’s ordinary right to sue, government assumes a corresponding duty to provide a fair and meaningful alternative. In 2005, Congress retained sweeping immunity for big pharma, while substituting a narrower, harsher, less transparent program effectively beyond the reach of any court. The manufacturers kept the protection. The injured were left to bear the loss.
The Two Numbers
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or VICP, has received more than 29,000 petitions since 1988. It has adjudicated 25,652 and compensated 12,588, with total compensation of roughly $5.5 billion. That results in a compensation rate of near 49 percent for adjudicated petitions (HRSA 2026).
The arrival of COVID-19 did not automatically place the new vaccines within the established National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Instead, the federal government treated them as emergency “covered countermeasures” under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. In March 2020, the Secretary of Health and Human Services issued a PREP Act declaration granting broad liability protection to the manufacturers, distributors, administrators, and planners involved in the federal COVID-19 response. That declaration directed people injured by COVID-19 vaccines away from the ordinary courts and into a little-known program created for medical countermeasures used during public-health emergencies: the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, or CICP.
The consequences were extraordinary. CICP has received more than 14,000 COVID-19 vaccine injury claims. Yet fewer than 1 percent of decided claims had been compensated, according to federal data current as of July 1, 2026 and cited by MCTLaw, a firm representing claimants and advising on pending reform legislation (Medical Daily 2026). The government had promoted and even mandated the vaccines, while placing those injured by them into a compensation program that rejects more than 99 percent of the claims it decides.
These figures use the same basic denominator: claims that reached a decision measured against claims that were paid. Pending petitions are excluded from both. The two programs cover different products under different statutes. The numbers of claims approved versus denied establish that these systems behave radically differently. When one program compensates roughly half of the petitions it decides, and another compensates fewer than one in a hundred, the discrepancy is minor; it is an injustice of the highest order. It is the predictable result of how Congress designed the programs.
A person covered by VICP, the established compensation program for routinely recommended vaccines, has three years from the first symptom or manifestation of injury to file. An attorney may take the case knowing that reasonable fees can be paid even if the petition ultimately fails, provided it was filed in good faith and had a reasonable basis. A qualifying injury listed on the Vaccine Injury Table may carry a presumption of causation. A special master hears the case, and the decision can be reviewed by the Court of Federal Claims and then appealed.
The person sent to CICP (COVID vaccine injuries) has 1 year from the date of administration of the countermeasure. There is no comparable injury-table presumption for COVID-19 vaccine claims, no attorney-fee provision, no compensation for pain and suffering, and no independent judicial review of a denial. The claimant must produce compelling, reliable, valid medical and scientific evidence while frequently ill, financially strained, and unable to hire counsel on economically realistic terms. If CICP denies the claim, the claimant may request reconsideration by the same program. After that, the decision is final. There is no independent appeal and no court authorized to review the denial. A “no” from CICP is, for all practical purposes, the end of the line for compensation.
This is the same country and the same federal government, invoking the same public principle that “rare” vaccine injuries may be the price society pays for access to protected medical products. Yet it has created two radically different concepts of justice.
The Bargain Congress Made
Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986 because litigation over the DTP vaccine had driven manufacturers from the American market and destabilized supply. The problem was real. Congress confronted a collision between two legitimate concerns: preserving access to vaccines and preserving the right of people injured by a product to seek compensation. It concluded that the existing tort system could not serve both goals on the existing terms.
What Congress built was an exchange. Manufacturers received substantial protection from ordinary civil litigation. An injured person generally could not proceed directly with a civil claim exceeding $1,000 against a covered manufacturer without first filing a petition under VICP and allowing judgment to enter (CRS 2026a). In return, the injured received something of value: an administrative forum, special masters in the Court of Federal Claims, an injury table that could create a presumption of causation, attorney fees for qualifying petitions, and a dedicated funding mechanism.
Congress financed the program through an excise tax imposed on vaccine manufacturers, producers, and importers. The original tax varied by vaccine, but in 1997 Congress replaced those rates with a flat charge of 75 cents for each disease a vaccine prevents. An MMR dose therefore carries a $2.25 tax, while an influenza dose carries a 75-cent tax. Congress has not increased or indexed that amount since 1997, allowing inflation to cut its real value roughly in half. The tax acknowledged that injuries were not imaginary merely because liability had been redirected away from the manufacturers.
In 1986, Congress took away part of the ordinary legal remedy and established an alternative system outside normal court processes, and there is no question that the one who benefited most was big pharma.
The People the Bargain Failed
Even the more generous of these two programs has never made every injured family whole. A payment statistic cannot measure the years spent fighting the government, the deterioration of a patient while a claim crawls through the system, or the difference between an administrative award and what a jury might have awarded after hearing the full story. VICP caps compensation for pain and suffering and for vaccine-related death at $250,000. That figure has not kept pace with nearly four decades of inflation, much less with the actual cost of catastrophic disability. A family facing lifelong nursing care, inaccessible housing, lost earnings, and the destruction of an ordinary family life quickly learns that a statutory remedy and full compensation are not the same thing.
The autism cases are among the most painful examples. Autism was not categorically excluded from the statute, and families were permitted to file petitions. Thousands did. In the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, six test cases were selected to evaluate three general theories: that MMR combined with thimerosal caused autism, that thimerosal alone caused autism, and that MMR alone caused autism. The special masters rejected those theories, effectively closing the principal VICP pathway for more than 5,000 families alleging vaccine-induced autism.
But at least part of the scientific record used by government counsel was seriously tainted. The government relied upon Danish epidemiological studies produced through a CDC-funded research program led by Poul Thorsen, who has now pleaded guilty to stealing more than $1 million from that program. The CDC scientist who helped construct the sole-source funding opportunity was in an undisclosed romantic relationship with Thorsen, accepted gifts from him, and co-authored research produced under the award. The legally required Danish human-subjects approvals were never obtained. When CDC officials discovered the problem in 2009, after two papers had already been published and while the autism litigation was underway, they helped obtain retroactive ethical coverage rather than notifying the journals or the special masters.
So, the studies used by the government to defeat vaccine-autism claims emerged from a research program compromised by theft, undisclosed conflicts of interest, missing ethical approvals, and an extraordinary lack of institutional accountability. CDC never appears to have commissioned a serious independent reanalysis of the study designs, data, statistics, or conclusions after those facts became known. The vaccine court moved on. The government moved on. The children remained disabled, and their families were left to carry the cost for the rest of their lives. The full documentary history is examined in “Stolen Money, Missing Approvals.”
This is where sterile discussions of “claims” become morally evasive. A denied claim is still attached to a human being. Some claimants were unable to prove causation, and some may have been mistaken about the cause of an injury. Others faced the nearly impossible task of proving a complex biological event with incomplete clinical records, limited research, and no access to the internal evidence that ordinary litigation discovery might have produced. Some were too poor or didn’t know how to obtain legal counsel. When government and industry insist that only a very small number of injuries are genuinely attributable to vaccines, they should be willing to operate a system capable of identifying and generously compensating those individuals. Instead, the same institutional apparatus that describes serious injury as rare often makes proof of a rare injury prohibitively difficult.
Had these cases proceeded in ordinary civil court, manufacturers would have faced discovery, depositions, expert testimony before juries, and the possibility of damages reflecting pain, suffering, lost earning capacity, lifetime care, and punitive conduct where warranted. Not every claimant would have won. But successful catastrophic-injury cases could have produced awards many times larger than the capped or tightly calculated amounts available under federal programs. Compared with that potential exposure, the billions paid by VICP over nearly four decades amount to pennies on the dollar for an industry granted extraordinary protection from the ordinary consequences of selling a defective product.
Nor were those billions paid directly out of pharmaceutical-company profits. They came from an excise tax attached to vaccine sales, embedded in the product’s price and spread across the market. And we as taxpayers get to pay for it all. The public underwrites the vaccination program, assumes the risk of injury, finances the compensation system, and then watches government lawyers contest the claims of the injured. Manufacturers have largely walked away from the courtroom exposure that every other major industry regards as a cost of doing business.
The Bargain Congress Broke
The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005, enacted within Public Law 109-148, added sections 319F-3 and 319F-4 to the Public Health Service Act. Section 319F-3 grants immunity for covered countermeasures. Section 319F-4 created CICP, which COVID vaccine injuries are adjudicated. On paper, Congress again paired immunity with compensation. In substance, it preserved the part that protects manufacturers and eliminated the part meant to protect injured people.
The 2005 PREP Act shield is broad in every direction. It covers manufacture, distribution, administration, and use, and it protects manufacturers, distributors, program planners, qualified persons who administer the products, and the United States itself. It reaches claims caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the use of a covered countermeasure. The nominal exception is willful misconduct, pursued through an exclusive federal cause of action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia under a standard that has never been met in a reported vaccine case.
Congress designed CICP differently from the beginning. The PREP Act, enacted on December 30, 2005, limited compensation to serious physical injury or death, demanded proof of direct causation based on “compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence,” excluded pain and suffering, and placed the process under the control of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. When HHS issued the program’s implementing regulations in 2010, it added the one-year filing deadline, detailed the internal reconsideration process, and made clear that the agency’s final eligibility decision was not subject to judicial review. CICP was not a generous program that later became restrictive. It was built that way.
Again, the deadline is one year from administration rather than VICP’s three years from the first manifestation of injury. That alone can defeat someone who spends months seeking a diagnosis, being passed from specialist to specialist, or being told that the symptoms are coincidental, psychological, or unrelated
Most physicians were discouraged or even reprimanded by employers and health-care institutions during the pandemic from documenting a possible vaccine injury in the medical record, leaving patients without the very evidence the government would later demand as proof.
There is no comparable injury table for those who are COVID-19 vaccine-injured. The claimant must produce compelling, reliable, valid medical and scientific evidence without the ability to pay attorney fees from the award. Compensation is secondary to other payment sources, lost employment income is capped, and pain and suffering are excluded altogether.
Then comes the feature that should offend people across the political spectrum: a denial cannot be reviewed by a court. An unsuccessful VICP claimant may seek review by the Court of Federal Claims and then the Federal Circuit. A CICP claimant may not appeal. Government has closed the courthouse door, designed the replacement process, set the evidentiary burden, decided the claim, and insulated its denial from independent judicial scrutiny. Calling that compensation for a vaccine injury is a farce.
In 2005, Congress kept the protection for manufacturers and abandoned the promise it had made to the injured.It preserved the half of the 1986 bargain that benefits manufacturers and reduced the half intended for injured people to an administrative gesture. The consequences remained obscure until COVID-19 transformed a little-known countermeasures program into the only legal recourse for injuries arising from an unprecedented national vaccination campaign.
And Then COVID Happened
During the pandemic, Americans were repeatedly told that vaccination was not merely a private medical choice but a civic obligation. Federal agencies promoted the products. State and local governments imposed requirements in many settings. The federal government, universities, hospitals, corporations, and the military made vaccination a condition of education, participation, or employment. People lost their jobs, careers, schooling, military status, or ability to enter public life if they refused.
When serious injuries occurred, those same people discovered that the system for justice was non-existent. The authorities that had insisted upon vaccination did not build a transparent, accessible, adequately funded system prepared to care for the injured. Manufacturers were protected under the PREP Act. Employers and administrators operated under emergency policy. The injured person was left with CICP, its one-year deadline, its formidable causation standard, no paid lawyer, no damages for pain and suffering, and no judge empowered to review a denial.
This is why the fewer-than-1-percent figure matters. A program rejecting more than 99 percent of decided claims while concealing much of its case-specific reasoning should have to demonstrate that it is separating valid claims from invalid ones rather than merely separating injured people from compensation. The government demands evidence from claimants while providing remarkably little evidence that its own adjudication is fair.
For people who lost their health after doing what government, employers, physicians, and public campaigns urged or required, the abandonment is especially bitter. Many did not oppose vaccination. They trusted the system. Some participated precisely because they believed they were protecting others. Once injured, they encountered a bureaucracy far more certain of its reasons for denial than many physicians had ever been about diagnosis or treatment. They became inconvenient witnesses to a policy success story that had no room for damaged lives.
Who Really Pays for the Liability?
A liability shield does not eliminate the cost of injury. It transfers it. A manufacturer avoids unpredictable tort exposure while the injured person absorbs medical expenses, lost income, disability, and pain the compensation system does not cover. Families provide unpaid nursing care. Private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, disability programs, charities, churches, and local communities absorb other portions. The injury disappears from the manufacturer’s balance sheet and reappears everywhere else in society.
Litigation also does more than transfer money. Discovery can reveal what a manufacturer knew, when it knew it, how safety signals were evaluated, what was excluded from a trial, and how risks were described internally compared with how they were described to the public. Jury trials place those facts in an adversarial forum outside the agencies that approved, purchased, recommended, or promoted the product. When immunity prevents litigation, it suppresses not only damages but one of the principal mechanisms by which information about defective products reaches the public.
The excise tax in the 1986 system was intended to place some of the financial burden back on the product. Yet that tax has remained $0.75 per antigen since 1986 and has lost roughly two-thirds of its real value. Congress has increased the rate vaccine manufacturers must pay. Manufacturer protection remained extraordinarily valuable while the monies allocated to help the vaccine injured steadily shrank.
No Immunity Without a Real Remedy
Reform should begin with a principle simple enough for any member of Congress to understand: no immunity without meaningful compensation. If government eliminates the ordinary right to sue, the replacement cannot be an office that rejects more than 99 percent of decided claims, pays no attorney fees, excludes pain and suffering, and answers to no court. An administrative system may be faster and more predictable than tort litigation, but only if it is designed to deliver justice rather than simulate it. Only if the process and discovery is as transparent as the court system it is designed to replace.
Every PREP Act declaration should therefore be conditioned on a compensation system meeting minimum standards: at least three years to file, reasonable attorney fees for claims brought in good faith with a reasonable basis, a transparent presumption mechanism comparable to an injury table, compensation reflecting actual economic loss and catastrophic disability, and independent judicial review. CICP denials should be reviewable in the Court of Federal Claims under ordinary administrative-law standards. The program should also publish deidentified decisions explaining the evidence, reasoning, and standard applied to every denial. If its work is fair, transparency will vindicate it. If it is not, injured people should not have to guess how the government failed them.
VICP also requires repair. The excise tax should be adjusted and indexed to inflation, and compensation caps should reflect present-day losses rather than the value Congress assigned to death and suffering four decades ago. Department of Justice attorneys should stop treating the program as though its principal purpose were to defeat claimants. Congress promised a humane alternative to civil litigation, not years of publicly financed warfare against sick people and exhausted families.
The PREP Act contains one supposed escape from manufacturer immunity: “willful misconduct.” But this does not mean ordinary negligence, inadequate testing, failure to investigate a safety signal, or even reckless conduct. A claimant must prove an intentional act or omission taken knowingly, without legal or factual justification, and in disregard of a known or obvious risk so great that the harm was highly probable.
The claim may be filed only in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, must satisfy special pleading requirements, and is subject to an unusually demanding evidentiary standard. The exception has never succeeded in a reported vaccine case.
Congress should either create a standard that a person with credible evidence of deliberately concealed harm can realistically meet or admit that manufacturer immunity is effectively absolute. What we have now is public relations written into law. If credible evidence shows that a manufacturer deliberately concealed material harm, an injured person should have a practical route to court.
None of these reforms requires Americans to agree about vaccine efficacy, autism, COVID policy, mandates, or the wisdom of any particular recommendation. One can believe vaccines have prevented disease and still insist that a society benefiting from them owes a profound debt to those seriously injured by them.
Indeed, the stronger one’s belief in vaccination as a public good, the stronger the obligation should be. A public-health program cannot ask individuals to accept a small risk for everyone else and then treat the unlucky few as collateral damage when that risk becomes their life or death.
The Government Cannot Take Away a Right and Call It Justice
State legislatures require certain vaccines for school attendance and sometimes for employment. Federal agencies recommend and promote them; they even buy them in bulk for free distribution for school-aged children. During emergencies, public officials may pressure nearly every institution in the country to require them.
Congress then closes the courthouse door to people injured by vaccines and substitutes a remedy of its own design. Each of these acts is an exercise of public power over a private person, and each creates an obligation on the part of the state toward the sovereign individual.
That obligation does not vanish because causation is scientifically complicated, because acknowledging an injury is politically inconvenient, or because a claimant has received a diagnosis the compensation program does not recognize as vaccine-caused. A child with lifelong disability still needs lifelong care. A previously healthy adult who can no longer work still has a mortgage, a family, and a body that no longer functions as it did. People who did what authorities asked of them should not have to beg those same authorities to acknowledge their existence and their injuries.
The government cannot have this both ways. It cannot describe vaccination as a collective duty when demanding compliance and then redefine injury as a purely private misfortune when compensation is due. It cannot tell the public that serious injuries are exceedingly rare while constructing a claims process seemingly designed to ensure that exceedingly few are recognized. It cannot shield manufacturers from discovery, jury verdicts, reputational damage, and punitive exposure while pretending that a minuscule administrative payment leaves an injured family made whole, when it isn’t.
The 1986 Congress decided that big pharma needed protecting from lawsuits. It protected vaccine supply, protected manufacturers, and created a funded remedy for those who paid the human price. The 2005 Congress’s program to address vaccine damage was flawed. COVID exposed what that choice meant on a national scale: manufacturers received extraordinary protection while injured Americans encountered a program that compensated fewer than one in a hundred decided claims.
These are not anti-vaccine statistics or pro-vaccine statistics. They measure whether the United States keeps faith with its own citizens. Big Pharma received something worth incalculable sums: protection from the civil-justice system and from verdicts that might have forced companies to pay the full price of the injuries their products caused.
The victims received deadlines, caps, closed records, hostile burdens of proof, and far too often, rejection. Many were damaged for life. Some have spent years without meaningful compensation. Families caring for profoundly disabled children, including families who believed a vaccine contributed to an autism diagnosis or regression, were left to carry costs that no government ruling could make disappear. And frankly, people died from their vaccine injuries.
The bargain is not complicated. If the state takes away a citizen’s right to seek justice, the state assumes the duty to provide it. If industry wants immunity, it must bear the full and honest cost of the injuries caused by its products. Anything less is not public health. It is the privatization of profit and the profiteering of human suffering. Congress did not merely forget the injured. It built a system in which their losses could be denied, discounted, and ultimately ignored while one of the most powerful industries in America walked away protected.
This failure did not end with COVID. The liability shield now intersects with a federal strategy built around adaptable medical platforms, raising a new question: what happens when a manufacturer changes the genetic payload but retains much of the regulatory and legal architecture of the original product?
That is the subject of the next essay.
RWM/JGM
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Original post from Tai Chi Chuan Five Winds – Ian Cameron on Facebook. I have often talked about the time I spent with Sifu Cheng Tin Hung and his students in the early seventies, the subsequent visits and how they went about their training. It was to give some idea of the environment and the attitude of his students toward their training. The reason behind my writing about it was in the hope that it might be approached in a similar way when transposed to these shores.It was very much a no frills school. Learning by doing was the way. Often after class, especially after Saturday morning training, it was off to a local restaurant for lunch and a bit of socialising.Never any talk or speculation about the where, how or the why or who zoomed who. It was just pleasant chat, then home. At that time there was no internet, forums, group chats or any other distractions, a blessing.The view from our apartment in HK was of a round fountain made up of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Each morning we would see a group of elderly women going through their swordform in front of this fountain. It was a pleasure to see them simply enjoying their morning exercise.The thing that always struck me was how matter of fact it all was. It was the same at Sifu Cheng’s gym, no theorising or analysing, just practice.Now however, we have endless opinions and chatter, mostly through these forums, of which I am happy to say, I hear about but have nothing to do with. There is no harm in enquiry, it’s when it turns in to speculation about what might have happened years ago between a student and teachers that things get out of shape. Did they get together to do this, that or the next thing? Who knows? If they did, why isn’t it known? No record of it so lets guess what might have occurred.The danger is things can become fabricated, exaggerated, what might have happened becomes ‘fact.’ People then begin to look for something that isn’t there, mysterious connections or some hidden ‘secret’ that never existed. People always love the mystery, the thing not being taught,what are we not being shown? Practicing Tai Chi isn’t enough, lets look for what we ‘don’t have.’Personally I have never had much time for so the called ‘secrets’ or the ‘hidden’ whatever. It was enough for me to just get on with what I learned at Sifu Cheng’s gym. He would show a technique such as White Snake Puts out its Tongue and the technique within it. It wasn’t a big deal he just demonstrated as matter of fact.Drape the Body, a ‘hidden’ technique? It is mentioned in a book by Xu Zhiyi (1958) and is called Drape the Body and Kick. Another technique from the same book: Cast Away Punch: Imagine the debate around that when it is simply Throw the Fist. This shows that names/language can change our perception of a technique. Drape the Body might just be describing the shape ofthe body prior to the kick. There doesn’t always have to be ‘mystery.’Everything is hidden until it is needed, then you will respond in some way, depending upon your level of training. Everything is ‘hidden’ in The Ready Stance.What we have right here is the practice and that should be the focus, not what might have or not taken place years ago. Tai Chi is all about practice and through practice we learn. No guessing needed, it is all there. Let Tai Chi be the teacher.If you look you can’t see it.If you listen you can’t hear it.If you grasp it you will lose it.Tao Te Ching.Ian Cameron
Three hundred sixty-six of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are not seriously in play this November. The Cook Political Report, which handicaps congressional races for a living, rates them solid for one party or the other. Just twenty-one are genuine toss-ups.
Think about what that means. Five out of every six House races are effectively over before the first ballot is printed. In most of America, the decisive political act was not Election Day. It was drawing the district lines.
If you live in one of those 366 districts, your representative is extraordinarily unlikely to lose in November. The real danger comes in the primary, where turnout is a fraction of what it is in the general election. That changes who matters. Your representative answers first to the relatively small number of voters who actually show up for the party primary. If you belong to the other party, or simply skip the primary, you barely enter the political calculation.
You still get to vote in November, of course. You get the sticker. You get the ritual. But in practical terms, you have very little ability to fire the person supposedly representing you.
And here is where the system gets even more interesting.
Two private political organizations largely control whose names appear on those primary ballots and which candidates receive the money, infrastructure, endorsements, consultants, voter data, and institutional support necessary to win. Between them, they have divided nearly the entire American political marketplace. Neither organization appears anywhere in the Constitution.
Economists have a word for competitors who fight furiously over market share while sharing an enormous interest in keeping everyone else out of the market. They call it a cartel.
That is the part of American elections nobody is fighting about, and it is the part that matters the most.
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The election integrity argument concerns the count. Voter identification, mail ballots, voter rolls, machine certification, audits after the fact. Those are real questions, and most of them belong to the states, where they have always belonged.
None of them touches the lines. Every congressional map in this year’s fight is constitutional. Districts come out equal in population to within a person or two, because the software that draws them is built to hit that number exactly. That is the entire federal standard. Count the people, make the numbers match. It says nothing about who drew the line, or why, or whether the winner was known a year in advance.
A clean count in a district drawn to produce a known result is a clean count of a question already settled.
Missouri’s eight days in court.
In September 2025, the Missouri legislature redrew the state’s congressional map in the middle of the decade, which is unusual, to eliminate the seat held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver. The new map would move Missouri from six Republicans and two Democrats to seven Republicans and one Democrat. It was not a general rule about how districts should look. The voters had not changed. The census had not changed. The politicians simply changed the electorate around the seat.
More than 305,000 Missourians signed petitions to force a public vote on the redistricting. Under the Missouri constitution, enough signatures suspend a law until voters decide. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins refused to certify the petitions and ran the August primary under the new map anyway.
On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Hoskins. The petitions had suspended the new map back in December, meaning it had never taken effect. On September 8, the deadline for printing ballots, Justice Kavanaugh rejected the state’s emergency appeal. Minutes later, however, a federal judge in St. Louis ordered Missouri to use the new map. An appeals court left that order in place. Two days later, on September 10, the Supreme Court blocked it in an unsigned order, with no explanation and no recorded dissents.
Missourians will vote in November under the lines drawn in 2022. But the August primary was conducted under the now-discarded 2025 map. That means some voters will vote in a different congressional district in November than they did in August, and some nominees will face voters who had no opportunity to participate in the primary that selected them.
Republicans did it in Missouri. Democrats did it in California.
Last year, California voters approved Proposition 50, setting aside the congressional maps drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replacing them with maps drawn by the Democratic-controlled legislature for elections through 2030.
Democrats defended the move as a response to Republican redistricting in Texas. Republicans defended Missouri’s redraw as part of the same national fight.
The pattern is difficult to miss. Neither party consistently opposes partisan redistricting. Each condemns it when the other party draws the lines and defends it when the advantage is its own.
Congress had the constitutional authority to intervene. It did not.
Instead, Missouri spent eight days bouncing between four courts while voters did not know which congressional districts would ultimately govern the election. The institution the Constitution expressly empowered to make or alter the rules never entered the fight.
Congress already has the power.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate congressional elections. Article I, Section 4 says the states set the times, places, and manner of those elections, but the very same sentence says Congress may “make or alter” those rules.
This is not a loophole or a modern interpretation. It is written into the Constitution itself, and the founders debated the provision publicly. Hamilton defended it in the Federalist Papers because leaving Congress entirely dependent upon rules made by the states could ultimately leave the federal government at their mercy.
Political parties, by contrast, have no constitutional role at all. The Constitution does not even mention them. The men who wrote it were deeply concerned about factions and the emergence of permanent political parties. Madison devoted Federalist 10 to the problem of faction. Washington later used his Farewell Address to warn against the “spirit of party.” The constitutional structure tied representation to states and congressional districts, not to two national party organizations dividing the country between them.
And Congress used the power the Constitution gave it. Beginning in 1842, Congress imposed federal requirements on how House members were elected. In 1872, it required congressional districts to contain roughly equal populations. In 1901, it required them to be compact, a restraint on the sprawling and contorted districts we now associate with gerrymandering. The 1911 law carried the single-member, contiguity, population, and compactness requirements forward.
Then Congress let those rules disappear. The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 made the allocation of House seats after each census automatic, ending the need for Congress to pass a new apportionment law every decade. But it included none of the previous federal standards governing how congressional districts were drawn. The 1941 law restored none of them. Congress finally restored the single-member-district requirement in 1967, amid concern about states using at-large elections.
The federal compactness requirement disappeared nearly a century ago. Congress has never restored it.
So yes, states normally administer elections. But congressional elections are constitutionally different. The Constitution gives states the first move and Congress the final authority to “make or alter” their rules. Congress once used that authority to set national standards for congressional districts.
It could do so again.
The Court tried to fix the problem and then quit halfway.
The federal courts eventually imposed the rule Congress had abandoned: equal population. By the early 1960s, some legislative districts contained vastly more people than others, while the legislators who benefited from those disparities had little incentive to change them.
In 1962, the Supreme Court opened the federal courthouse door to reapportionment challenges. Two years later, it required congressional districts within a state to contain roughly equal populations. The principle became known as “one person, one vote.”
But equal population governs the numbers, not the shape of the district.Every map in this year’s fight can satisfy the population rule while still being drawn for partisan advantage.
For decades, litigants tried to persuade federal courts to police partisan gerrymandering as well. In 2019, the Supreme Court said no. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts had no neutral, manageable constitutional standard for deciding how much partisan advantage was too much. Partisan-gerrymandering claims, the Court held, were beyond the reach of federal courts.
But Roberts did not say there was no remedy. He pointed directly back to Congress. The Framers had given Congress the power to address partisan gerrymandering through the Elections Clause, he wrote, and Congress had used that power before. “That avenue for reform,” the Court concluded, “remains open.”
Seven years later, Congress has not even attempted reform.
Why Congress prefers the system it has
The people with the power to fix congressional redistricting are often the people who benefit from leaving it alone.
Call your representative’s office and ask Congress to take up redistricting. You may be told that redistricting is a matter for the courts. But in 2019, the Supreme Court said federal courts would not police partisan gerrymandering. The responsibility circles back to Congress, and the circle closes.
Economist James M. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for developing public-choice theory, which applied economic analysis to political decision-making. His central insight was simple: politicians respond to incentives just as everyone else does. The people who write the rules have interests of their own.
That is the problem here. Neutral rules are easiest to adopt before anyone knows who will benefit from them.
Eighty-four percent of House seats are rated safe. A member sitting in one of them has little political incentive to make that seat more competitive. And the system protecting that member is the very system Congress would have to regulate.
The same incentive exists at the party level. The two parties would be writing rules that could take away districts they currently draw to their own advantage.
Congress has done this before.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed on September 14, 2001, three days after the attacks. It turns twenty-five on Monday. Five administrations have stretched it to cover groups that did not exist when it was written. Repealing it would take a majority and an afternoon.
The National Emergencies Act tells a similar story. In 1976, Congress gave itself the power to terminate a presidentially declared emergency by concurrent resolution, without a presidential signature. After the Supreme Court invalidated that kind of legislative veto in 1983, Congress amended the law to require a joint resolution, which the president can veto. Ending an emergency over a president’s objection therefore requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers.
The pattern is the same. Congress has constitutional and statutory powers that it can exercise, amend, reclaim, or restructure. When it declines to act, other institutions make the consequential decisions instead.
Congress holds a power, declines to use it, and somebody else fills the power vacuum. Nobody seized these powers. They were given away by Congress.
What Congress could do tomorrow
Congress does not need a constitutional amendment, a new agency, or new authority. It could write the rules now.
It could require congressional maps to respect county and municipal boundaries. Those lines were not designed for partisan advantage. They accumulated over generations around rivers, market towns, and courthouses, and often reflect communities that already conduct their affairs together. Carl Menger called institutions like these organic: they carry knowledge nobody planned and nobody can reproduce on demand. A county line tells us something about a community. A line drawn to eliminate one congressman tells us who drew it.
Congress could also repeal the 1967 requirement that every congressional district elect only one House member. That is what a “single-member district” means: one district, one seat, one winner. Gerrymandering depends heavily on that structure because mapmakers can manipulate who wins each seat by packing opponents into some districts and spreading them thinly across others. That becomes much harder when a larger district elects several representatives instead of just one.
Most important, Congress could make any new rules take effect years from now. A law governing maps drawn after the 2030 census would bind a future Congress whose partisan composition and political geography cannot be known with certainty today. A delayed start recreates some of the uncertainty that makes neutral rules easier to accept. It also addresses the immediate objection from either party: neither side has to change the rules solely for the other’s benefit.
Why Congress has not fixed it.
Congress can change these rules. The political incentives run in the opposite direction.
The people who would have to change the system include those who benefit from it. Buchanan’s objection was fundamental: ordinary legislation is a weak restraint when the people being restrained retain the power to rewrite it. Durable rules are easiest to establish when nobody knows in advance who will benefit.
That is the problem with redistricting. Of the 435 House races this November, 366 are currently rated Solid for one party or the other. In most districts, the decisive political competition occurs before the general election. A perfectly accurate count does not change the boundaries within which those votes are cast. Voter ID does not change them. An audit does not change them. The argument over election integrity largely begins after the political geography has already been decided.
Missouri and California are not opposing principles. Republican officials pursued a mid-decade redraw in Missouri; Democratic officials pursued one in California. Each case used different procedures and arose in different circumstances, but both demonstrate the same structural fact: political parties have powerful incentives to seek favorable district lines when the law allows them to do so.
That brings us back to where we started. The parties compete fiercely over who controls the lines. The harder question is who writes the rules governing the lines themselves. The Constitution gives Congress that power. For nearly a century, Congress has largely declined to use it.
Both parties fund outlets that will explain to you that the other party is the problem. MALONE.NEWS has no party. It has paid subscribers. That is the entire funding model, and it’s why we can publish an essay indicting both sides.
The rule covers two things: who counts as having a “usual residence” for House apportionment, and what demographic questions can appear on the short-form questionnaire. Comments are due October 13, 2026.
There are two parts to consider: I. Proposed Residence Criteria
II. Proposed Restrictions on the Inclusion of Certain Demographic Questions in the Decennial Census Operation
The core change is this: U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (green-card holders) would be counted where they lawfully live most of the time. Most other foreign nationals would not be counted for apportionment, including people here illegally and people whose legal status is less durable than a green card.
What you should know:
Every ten years the government counts people so it can decide how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives. The Constitution says to count the “persons in each State.” For a long time the Census Bureau counted almost everyone living here on Census Day, including people who are not citizens and people who are here illegally.
This new proposal says a person should only count if they have a real, lasting home in the United States and a strong enough legal tie to the country. That means:
American citizens count.
People with green cards count.
People here illegally do not count for the House-seat numbers.
Many people here on temporary visas, pending asylum, or other short-term status also would not count.
The Bureau would use tax records, Homeland Security records, and other government files to figure out who belongs in which group. The proposal also says the short census form should not ask about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. It can still ask about sex at birth, date of birth, and who lives in the house.
The Bureau says this matches the original idea of “usual residence” from the first census in 1790 and later court cases that talk about allegiance and a lasting home.
How the rule would help or hurt American citizens, and how it treats non-citizens in apportionment
How it would help American citizens
Apportionment decides political power: House seats and Electoral College votes. When large numbers of non-citizens (especially people here illegally) are added to a state’s total, that state can gain seats even if its citizen population is smaller or growing more slowly. States with fewer illegal residents lose relative power. Citizens in those states get less say in Congress and presidential elections.
This rule tries to stop that. It would count people who are part of the political community (citizens and those given durable permission to stay) and leave out people whose presence the government itself treats as unlawful or temporary. That is the point of the “allegiance” and “inhabitants / body politic” argument in the proposal.
It would also reduce the political payoff for policies that attract or retain large illegal populations. If those populations no longer add House seats, the incentive to treat them as a source of representation shrinks.
Using tax and immigration records instead of relying only on a self-reported form could also make the count harder to game and less dependent on neighborhood-by-neighborhood cooperation.
How it could hurt or create problems
The Constitution’s text says “persons,” not “citizens.” Courts have long allowed the Bureau to count residents regardless of legal status. This rule will be sued immediately. A long court fight could delay planning for 2030 or force last-minute changes.
Some people living here legally but without green cards (certain visa holders, students, refugees with pending cases) would be left out of the apportionment total even if they work, pay some taxes, and have lived here for years. Imperfect records could misclassify people.
Federal funding formulas often use total-population numbers from the census or related estimates. This rule is written for the apportionment count, not every funding stream, but critics will argue it still distorts resources. Participation could drop if households fear that answering will expose immigration status.
In short: the rule protects citizen representation in the House and Electoral College if it survives the courts and is implemented accurately. It does so by treating most non-citizens without green cards as lacking the “usual residence” and allegiance the Bureau now says the Constitution requires. That is a real change from 2020 practice, which counted foreign citizens “living in” the United States without regard to legal status.
Keep comments polite, specific, and in your own words. These sample comments are drafts you can copy or adapt.
Comment 1 — Constitutional purpose
I support the proposed residence criteria. The decennial census exists first to apportion the House among the states based on the people who actually belong to the political community of each state. Counting people who are here illegally, or who hold only temporary permission, inflates some states’ numbers and steals representation from citizens in other states. “Usual residence” has always included an element of lasting tie and allegiance. People who the government itself says may not remain here do not have that tie. Please adopt the rule so the 2030 count matches the Constitution’s purpose instead of rewarding illegal presence.
Comment 2 — Fairness to citizens and states
American citizens should not lose House seats and electoral votes because another state has a large population of people who entered or stayed in violation of federal law. That is what happens under the old “count everyone living here” approach. The proposed rule correctly includes U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents and excludes illegal aliens and those with less durable status. That is fair to the citizens who vote, pay taxes as members of the body politic, and live under our laws. I urge the Bureau to finalize these criteria and use administrative records from DHS and Treasury so the count is accurate and not based on self-reports that can be gamed.
Comment 3 — Process and records
I support both parts of this proposal. The census should not be turned into a social survey about race or sexual orientation when its core job is a headcount for apportionment. More important, the residence rules should stop treating illegal presence as if it created a “usual residence” equal to that of a citizen or green-card holder. I am concerned that past counts mixed people with no lawful claim to remain into the numbers that decide political power. Using tax records and immigration files is a better, more objective way to apply the rules. Please keep the exclusion of illegal aliens and non-durable statuses and do not weaken it during the comment period.
Thoughts from X:
Foreign-born numbers fell — midterms (and the census) decide next
Synopsis: Hard numbers put immigration at the center of the midterms and the next census fight. The country saw negative net migration for the first time in about a century, with millions of illegal aliens gone and the foreign-born population down. Several posts push to exclude illegal aliens from the census.
@johncwright2001 lists the scoreboard: negative net migration for the first time in 100 years; about 6 million illegal aliens gone; foreign-born population down by about 3 million; Laken Riley Act signed; catch-and-release ended; record-low border encounters.
Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the lead educator at Influencing Olympia Effectively. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. You can also connect with her on Substackand X. The opinions expressed in Influencing Olympia are her own.
SOURCES:
A Proposed Rule by the Census Bureau. This document has a comment period that ends on October 13, 2026.
Thank you for reading Influencing Olympia Effectively. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Republicans do not have an accomplishment problem. They have an information problem. Midterms are coming, and too many Republican voters cannot easily name even three things President Trump has accomplished. Fortunately, he has done more in a year and a half than most presidents do in four years…
My liberal facebook friends are all into puppies (and horses), but children… not so much.
I think that speaks volumes…
The American experiment was never supposed to be an experiment in how much responsibility could be transferred from citizens to government. It rested on almost the opposite proposition: that a free people could govern themselves, care for their communities, solve problems locally, and voluntarily cooperate without waiting for direction from a distant bureaucracy. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this as one of the most remarkable characteristics of America when he traveled the young nation in the 1830s. Americans, he observed, were extraordinary association-builders. When they wanted a church, school, hospital, road, charitable organization, civic improvement, or political reform, they formed a group and did something about it.
This dense network of families, churches, voluntary associations, businesses, towns, and local institutions created a civil society strong enough that government did not have to occupy every corner of life. The American experiment was always about self-rule, otherwise known as self-sovereignty.
Volunteerism builds citizenship because people retain both responsibility and agency. Big government progressively replaces both. The American experiment depends not merely upon elections and constitutional language, but upon preserving a people sufficiently independent, prosperous, cohesive, and self-reliant to govern themselves. Once citizens become clients of the state and communities surrender their functions to centralized bureaucracies, we may retain the outward machinery of a republic while losing much of what made the republic possible in the first place.
But a culture must first understand the principles of volunteerism and the importance of governing itself. Self-government is not simply a constitutional arrangement. It is a learned behavior, passed from one generation to the next.
Ronald Reagan may have articulated the fragility of that inheritance best when he warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Liberty does not perpetuate itself. A nation is only as capable of self-government as its people are willing and able to assume the responsibilities that self-government requires. Citizens must understand that freedom comes with obligations: to family, neighbors, community, local institutions, and ultimately the nation itself. When those habits disappear, government (and in particular, the courts) inevitably moves into the vacuum.
This is also why immigration and immigration policy cannot be separated from culture. America has historically absorbed enormous numbers of immigrants, but successful immigration required something more than crossing a border and finding employment. It required assimilation into the American experiment.
Orderly immigration gives a nation the ability to decide how many newcomers it can successfully absorb and provides newcomers the time and institutional structure necessary to learn the language, laws, history, customs, and civic expectations of their new country. That means they must want to become Americans and participate in the American experiment.
Flooding a nation with newcomers faster than assimilation can reasonably occur is something fundamentally different. Many immigrants may be admirable, industrious people seeking better lives, but they cannot reasonably be expected to arrive already understanding Tocqueville’s America: voluntary associations, limited government, local responsibility, constitutional restraint, private property, individual liberty, and the expectation that citizens govern themselves rather than look automatically to the state. Those ideas are culturally transmitted.
If immigration occurs faster than the receiving society can transmit them, America risks importing populations without successfully creating Americans in the civic sense. The issue, therefore, is that the immigration wave became so large and rapid over the past fifty years that the American experiment itself has been diluted before newcomers have even had the opportunity to understand it.
In the terrible days after September 11, 2001, Americans were reminded of something we had begun to forget: what it meant to be American. For a brief time, the labels that divide us mattered less than the country that united us. Flags appeared on porches, strangers helped strangers, churches filled, and firefighters, police officers, soldiers, and ordinary citizens became our heroes.
We remembered that America is more than a government or a piece of land. It is a shared inheritance of liberty, courage, sacrifice, and responsibility to one another. Perhaps the lesson of 9/11 worth remembering today is that we should not need another tragedy to remember who we are.
“And I proud to be an American…” God bless the USA”
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When we talk about respiratory infections, we tend to talk about where the disease eventually causes trouble. Influenza can cause pneumonia. RSV can infect the lower respiratory tract. COVID-19 can involve the lungs. Bacterial infections can cause pneumonia and serious systemic illness. But this way of thinking skips one of the most important parts of the story. For many respiratory pathogens, the lungs are not where the infection begins. The first encounter happens considerably farther north, in the nose, nasal passages, throat, and connected sinuses.
The nose is the primary portal of entry into the respiratory tract, but it is also one of its most important gatekeepers. Every day we inhale thousands upon thousands of particles: dust, pollen, fungal spores, bacteria, viruses and all sorts of microscopic debris. Yet relatively few of these succeed in causing disease. That is because the nose is not simply an open pipe leading to the lungs. It is a remarkably sophisticated biological barrier designed to trap, disable and remove potential invaders before they can establish themselves.
Imagine standing in a room with someone who has influenza. They cough, laugh or simply breathe, releasing virus-containing droplets and tiny aerosols into the air. You inhale some of them. The virus does not magically appear in your lungs or bloodstream. Much of what you inhale first encounters the warm, moist surfaces lining your nose and upper airway. Immediately, a contest begins. The outcome of that contest may determine whether you ever know that encounter occurred.
The first obstacle is surprisingly simple: mucus. We tend to notice mucus only when we have too much of it, but a thin layer covers the nasal passages all the time. It is sticky for a reason. Viruses, bacteria, and particles entering the nose can become trapped in it rather than continuing deeper into the respiratory tract. Underneath this mucus are specialized cells equipped with microscopic hair-like structures called cilia. The cilia beat in coordinated waves, continuously moving mucus and the material trapped within it toward the throat, where it can be swallowed and ultimately destroyed or eliminated. This is called mucociliary clearance, but I prefer to think of it as the respiratory tract’s conveyor belt.
The system is considerably more sophisticated than a sticky filter and a conveyor belt. The cells lining the nose are themselves active participants in immunity. They can recognize molecular signs that a virus or bacterium has arrived and respond by producing interferons and other chemical signals. These signals warn neighboring cells, activate antiviral defenses, and recruit immune cells to the site. Antimicrobial substances are present in nasal secretions, and antibodies, particularly secretory IgA, patrol the mucosal surface where respiratory pathogens first arrive.
This is mucosal immunity, and it is critically important. During COVID-19, enormous attention was focused on antibodies circulating in the blood. Those antibodies matter, particularly in preventing severe systemic disease, but they are not the whole immune system. A respiratory virus generally does not begin by jumping directly into the bloodstream. It lands on a mucosal surface. If we want to understand whether infection becomes established, we have to pay attention to the immunity waiting at the actual front door.
The sinuses are part of this same system. They are air-filled spaces within the bones of the face and skull, lined with respiratory mucosa and connected to the nasal passages through relatively small openings. They produce mucus, have ciliated cells, and participate in the same system of filtration, clearance, and immune surveillance. Under normal circumstances, mucus continuously moves through these spaces and drains into the nasal cavity. The nose and sinuses therefore should not really be thought of as separate organs. They form an interconnected mucosal environment guarding the entrance to the respiratory tract.
But every gatekeeper has vulnerabilities. Suppose a virus succeeds in reaching a susceptible nasal cell and entering it. That one infected cell can become a miniature virus factory, producing new viral particles that infect neighboring cells. The infection begins spreading across the nasal mucosa. Inflammation follows. Blood vessels dilate, tissues swell, and mucus production increases. Suddenly that elegant drainage system does not work quite as efficiently. The small openings connecting the sinuses to the nose can narrow or become obstructed, mucus becomes trapped, and the environment changes.
This is one reason a seemingly ordinary viral cold can sometimes turn into something more complicated. The original infection may be viral, but inflammation and impaired drainage can create conditions in which bacteria that normally inhabit the nose and throat gain an advantage. The viral infection has damaged the gate and disrupted the guards. A secondary bacterial infection can then follow. The same general principle applies farther down the respiratory tract. Influenza, for example, can damage respiratory defenses and make subsequent bacterial pneumonia considerably more likely.
Temperature and humidity also affect these defenses. The nasal passages are cooler than the body’s core, which can favor replication of some respiratory viruses while also weakening local antiviral responses. Dry air can further impair the mucus and cilia that normally trap and sweep pathogens away. This may help explain why respiratory infections flourish during winter, when cold outdoor air and indoor heating create particularly dry conditions. Grandma may not have understood interferons or mucociliary clearance, but telling you to keep warm and avoid getting dried out wasn’t such bad advice after all.
What is remarkable is how often this system succeeds. We constantly encounter microorganisms that never cause recognizable illness. A virus may become trapped in mucus and swept away. An antibody may bind it before it enters a cell. An infected cell may trigger a rapid interferon response that prevents the infection from spreading. We never count these events because there is nothing to count. Nobody goes to the doctor to report the influenza infection they almost had.
This changes how we should think about respiratory disease. There is an enormous difference between exposure, infection, and disease. Exposure means the pathogen reached you. Infection means it successfully entered cells and began replicating. Disease means that process progressed far enough to produce symptoms or tissue damage. The nose and sinuses sit at the critical boundary between those stages. They are where exposure can either be stopped or allowed to become established infection.
Modern medicine understandably becomes most interested when things go badly. We study pneumonia, respiratory failure, systemic inflammation, and hospitalization because these are the events that kill people. But by concentrating on the end stages of disease, we can lose sight of the biology that determines whether many respiratory infections ever get that far. Before there is pneumonia, there is often a battle in the upper airway. Before a virus reaches the lungs, it frequently must establish itself in the nose or throat. Before the adaptive immune system mobilizes its full response, mucus, cilia, epithelial cells, interferons, antimicrobial molecules and local antibodies are already at work.
The nose and sinuses therefore occupy a rather extraordinary position. They are simultaneously the respiratory system’s most important portal of entry and one of its most important defensive barriers. The same doorway that gives viruses and bacteria access to us is guarded by an elaborate system evolved to keep them out. For most of our lives, that gatekeeping system quietly does its job and we never give it a thought. We tend to notice the nose only when it fails.
Perhaps we should pay considerably more attention to what keeps it working.
Can We Wash the Invaders Away?
Once we understand the nose and sinuses as both portal and gatekeeper, an obvious question follows: can we help that defensive system do its job?
One of the oldest and simplest approaches is nasal lavage. The idea is hardly sophisticated: put saline into the nasal passages and physically wash away mucus, particles, allergens, and at least some of the microorganisms sitting on the mucosal surface. At the same time, saline can help maintain the physical properties of mucus and support the cilia that continuously move material out of the respiratory tract.
For years, nasal irrigation was generally relegated to the category of “probably makes you feel better.” But the evidence has become more interesting. Recent randomized trials suggest that saline nasal sprays or irrigation can modestly shorten respiratory illnesses, reduce nasal symptoms and, in some studies, accelerate the decline in viral load. One very large randomized trial involving almost 14,000 people found that those assigned to use saline nasal spray at the first sign of a respiratory infection or after likely exposure experienced substantially fewer days of illness over the following six months.
This does not mean that you can wash your nose and magically prevent influenza, COVID or RSV. The studies are heterogeneous, not all trials have been positive, and once a virus has entered large numbers of cells, simply washing the surface cannot remove an intracellular infection. But timing may matter enormously. There is a considerable biological difference between trying to reduce the number of viral particles sitting on the nasal surface shortly after exposure and attempting the same thing three days later, after the virus has already replicated millions of times.
Think of it as washing mud off the porch before everyone has tracked it through the house.
There is also growing interest in adding antimicrobial substances to saline. One of the more intriguing is performing nasal washing using a very dilute mixture of saline and hypochlorous acid, or HOCl. Despite the chemical-sounding name, HOCl is not foreign to human biology. Our own neutrophils manufacture it as part of the innate immune response to microorganisms. It is one of the chemical weapons our immune system itself uses against invading organisms. At appropriately low concentrations, HOCl has broad antimicrobial activity against bacteria, fungi, and viruses.
Laboratory experiments using human nasal epithelial cells have found that low concentrations of HOCl can kill or inactivate multiple microorganisms, including influenza A virus, without detectable toxicity to the nasal cells under the conditions tested.
HOCl Has Moved Well Beyond the Laboratory
Hypochlorous acid is not some obscure experimental compound supported by a few laboratory studies. It has accumulated a substantial scientific and clinical literature involving antimicrobial activity, antisepsis, wound care, mucosal use and direct application to human tissues. In 2025, the World Health Organization added an explicit listing for hypochlorous acid solution as an environmental disinfectant to its Model Lists of Essential Medicines for adults and children, importantly distinguishing HOCl from hypochlorite, or bleach.
The clinical literature is substantial. The WHO submission itself summarized 25 publications, including 13 randomized controlled trials, involving applications ranging from infected wounds and diabetic ulcers to surgical infections and direct application to human tissues. The larger literature cited in that submission includes thousands of publications addressing HOCl antimicrobial activity, safety and wound healing.
There is also a US regulatory history that brings this much closer to home. Curativa Bay has an FDA-listed medical device for wound and burn care, intended for both over-the-counter and prescription use. Its indications include minor cuts, lacerations, abrasions and minor burns, including sunburn, and the federal device record classifies it as an “antimicrobial wound irrigation solution.”
In other words, we are not talking about a chemical whose established use is limited to disinfecting countertops. Properly formulated HOCl products are already regulated for application directly to injured human tissue.
But perhaps most relevant to our discussion, HOCl has also been put directly into human noses and studied in randomized clinical trials. A randomized placebo-controlled study of adults with chronic rhinosinusitis that had failed conventional medical therapy compared low-concentration HOCl nasal irrigation with saline for eight weeks. HOCl produced significantly greater improvement in sinus symptoms than saline at several early time points.
Researchers have also studied children with chronic sinusitis. In a prospective randomized trial, both saline and low-concentration HOCl irrigation improved symptoms, but improvement on sinus X-rays was significantly greater with HOCl. The authors concluded that HOCl nasal irrigation was an effective adjunctive treatment for pediatric chronic sinusitis. A separate multicenter, randomized, double-blind trial enrolled 139 patients with perennial allergic rhinitis. Both saline and HOCl irrigation significantly improved symptoms, although HOCl did not outperform saline. Just as importantly for the question of putting HOCl into the nose, investigators reported no clinical side effects attributable to the HOCl irrigation. HOCl nasal spray has also been investigated as an adjunct after functional endoscopic sinus surgery in patients with chronic rhinosinusitis.
So the question is no longer whether dilute HOCl can be used in the human nose. It has been. Nor are we relying solely upon laboratory experiments to argue that nasal exposure is tolerable. We have controlled human studies involving direct nasal irrigation, including adults, children, and patients with chronic inflammatory sinonasal disease.
What we do not yet have is something much more specific: a large randomized trial demonstrating that routine use of dilute HOCl nasal cleansing prevents influenza, COVID-19, RSV or the common cold better than saline alone.
But the data we have also changes the question. We know that the nose is a major portal of entry for respiratory pathogens. We know that saline nasal cleansing can improve mucociliary clearance and has clinical evidence in respiratory illness. We know that HOCl is produced naturally by our own neutrophils as part of innate immunity. We know that properly formulated HOCl has broad antimicrobial activity against bacteria, fungi and viruses. And we now know from randomized human studies that dilute HOCl can be used directly in the nasal passages and has shown clinical benefit in some chronic sinonasal conditions.
So we are no longer starting at square one.
The unanswered question is whether adding HOCl to routine nasal cleansing can help the gatekeepers do something even more important: stop or reduce an acute respiratory infection near the place where it begins.
That study should be relatively easy and inexpensive to do. Which raises an interesting question: given the enormous amounts of money spent developing drugs and vaccines against respiratory viruses, why has comparatively little serious research been devoted to inexpensive interventions aimed directly at the portal where many of these infections first become established?
Why did the government not fund or develop such studies during COVID?
Of course, HOCL is made by our own neutrophils. It is not a drug. It can not be patented. Big pharma has no big interest in the product. So, for some reason, the government has also not been interested in funding such a study. Coincidence? But given what we now understand about the nasal mucosa’s role in establishing respiratory infection, I think conducting such a study should be a research priority.
Give the Gatekeepers a Hand
This brings me to something that has become part of our own routine. We brush our teeth because we understand that the mouth is constantly exposed to bacteria. We wash our hands because we understand that our hands pick up microorganisms from the environment. Yet we inhale thousands of liters of air every day, carrying dust, pollen, bacteria, viruses and countless other particles across the mucosal surfaces of our noses, and most of us never give those surfaces another thought.
Given what we now know about nasal cleansing, mucociliary clearance and HOCl, the next question seems rather obvious: why not combine the mechanical benefits of saline nasal cleansing with a very dilute HOCl solution specifically formulated for the nose?
That is the idea behind the Gentle Nose Cleanser made by Curativa Bay, which we use and keep around ourselves. The nasal formulation contains saline and HOCl at approximately 40 ppm, substantially lower than the company’s 200 ppm HOCl skin formulation. It is designed to cleanse and hydrate the nasal passages while adding a low concentration of an antimicrobial molecule that our own immune system produces.
Saline nasal cleansing has clinical evidence behind it. HOCl has an extensive antimicrobial and human safety literature. HOCl nasal irrigation itself has been tested in randomized human trials, including patients with chronic sinusitis and allergic rhinitis. And laboratory studies demonstrate antimicrobial activity against respiratory viruses.
Put those pieces together, and I think HOCL deserves considerably more attention than it receives.
This is also where I part company with the idea that every useful intervention in medicine must begin with an expensive pharmaceutical product. Sometimes biology points us toward much simpler interventions. Supporting the physical and immunological barrier at the place where infection often begins is not particularly glamorous. There is no billion-dollar drug involved. Nobody needs an infusion center. You are simply helping the gatekeeper at the gate.
When we travel, spend time in crowded airports and airplanes, attend large events, or know that respiratory infections are circulating, nasal cleansing has become one of the simple measures we use. I cannot tell you that doing so guarantees that you will not become infected. It doesn’t. Nor should anyone selling a nasal cleanser make that promise.
What I can say is that the scientific case is considerably more developed than “it seems like a good idea.” The nose is a major portal of respiratory infection. Nasal cleansing has a clinical literature behind it. Dilute HOCl has actually been studied in the human nose, including in randomized trials. And HOCl itself has broad antimicrobial activity and an extensive history of human medical use.
That is enough evidence for me to use it routinely, and I do.
The nose is the front door to the respiratory tract. We spend enormous amounts of money dealing with what happens after an invader gets through that door.
Perhaps we should spend a little more effort taking care of the door.
If you find essays like this useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Malone News is reader-supported, and subscriptions allow us to spend the time digging into the scientific literature and asking questions that receive too little attention.
Full disclosure: I am the Chief Medical Officer at Curativa Bay. No, they did not pay me to write this article. I wrote it because I believe in the product. Sometimes a conflict of interest is simply an interest.
References
Little P, Vennik J, Rumsby K, et al. Nasal sprays and behavioural interventions compared with usual care for acute respiratory illness in primary care: a randomised, controlled, open-label, parallel-group trial. Lancet Respir Med. 2024;12(8):619-632. doi:10.1016/S2213-2600(24)00140-1. This large trial provides particularly useful evidence for the saline-nasal-spray portion of the article.
Ramalingam S, Graham C, Dove J, Morrice L, Sheikh A. A pilot, open labelled, randomised controlled trial of hypertonic saline nasal irrigation and gargling for the common cold (ELVIS). Sci Rep. 2019;9:1015. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-37703-3.
Kim HJ, Lee JG, Kang JW, Cho HJ, Kim HS, Byeon HK, Yoon JH. Effects of a low concentration hypochlorous acid nasal irrigation solution on bacteria, fungi, and virus. Laryngoscope. 2008;118(10):1862-1867. doi:10.1097/MLG.0b013e31817f4d34. PMID: 18677274. This in-vitro study used primary human nasal epithelial cells and found no detectable cytotoxicity after exposure to 3.5 ppm HOCl under the experimental conditions. HOCl demonstrated greater than 99% bactericidal or fungicidal activity against most organisms tested and produced a 3.2-log10 reduction in influenza A virus.
Cho HJ, Min HJ, Chung HJ, et al. Improved outcomes after low-concentration hypochlorous acid nasal irrigation in pediatric chronic sinusitis. Laryngoscope. 2016;126(4):791-795. doi:10.1002/lary.25605. This was a prospective randomized trial; both saline and HOCl improved symptoms, while radiographic improvement was greater with HOCl.
Yu MS, Kim BH, Kang SH, Lim DJ. Low-concentration hypochlorous acid nasal irrigation for chronic sinonasal symptoms: a prospective randomized placebo-controlled study. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol.2017;274(3):1527-1533. doi:10.1007/s00405-016-4387-5. PMID: 27853946. Forty-three adults with chronic rhinosinusitis refractory to medical therapy were randomized to HOCl or saline irrigation for eight weeks. The HOCl group showed greater improvement in CRS symptoms than saline, although endoscopic scores and bacterial culture results did not differ significantly.
Kim HC, Kim DK, Kim JS, et al. Hypochlorous Acid Versus Saline Nasal Irrigation in Allergic Rhinitis: A Multicenter, Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-controlled Study. Am J Rhinol Allergy. 2022;36(1):129-134. doi:10.1177/19458924211029428. Both groups improved; HOCl was well tolerated but did not significantly outperform saline.
Gutiérrez-García R, De La Cerda-Ángeles JC, Cabrera-Licona A, et al. Nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal rinses with neutral electrolyzed water prevents COVID-19 in front-line health professionals: A randomized, open-label, controlled trial in a general hospital in Mexico City. Biomed Rep. 2022;16(2):11. doi:10.3892/br.2021.1494. The trial randomized 170 frontline health-care workers; COVID-19 occurred in 1.2% of the rinse group versus 12.7% of controls. The study was open-label and several authors were employees of the product manufacturer, so those limitations should accompany the striking result.
Wang L, Bassiri M, Najafi R, et al. Hypochlorous acid as a potential wound care agent: Part I. Stabilized hypochlorous acid: a component of the inorganic armamentarium of innate immunity. J Burns Wounds.2007;6:e5. This is a useful foundational paper for explaining that HOCl is part of our own innate antimicrobial defenses rather than simply an industrial disinfectant.
Weiss SJ, Klein R, Slivka A, Wei M. Chlorination of taurine by human neutrophils: evidence for hypochlorous acid generation. J Clin Invest.1982;70(3):598-607. doi:10.1172/JCI110652. This is one of the classic mechanistic papers establishing production of HOCl by human neutrophils.
Guan H, Nuth M, Weiss SR, et al. HOCl rapidly kills Corona, Flu, and Herpes to prevent aerosol spread. J Dent Res. 2023;102(9):1031-1037. doi:10.1177/00220345231169434.
Dianty R, Hirano J, Anzai I, et al. Electrolyzed hypochlorous acid water exhibits potent disinfectant activity against various viruses through irreversible protein aggregation. Front Microbiol. 2023;14:1284274. doi:10.3389/fmicb.2023.1284274.
Del Rosso JQ, Bhatia N. Status report on topical hypochlorous acid: clinical relevance of specific formulations, potential modes of action, and study outcomes. J Clin Aesthet Dermatol. 2018;11(11):36-39.
Burian EA, Sabah L, Kirketerp-Møller K, Gundersen G, Agren MS. Effect of stabilized hypochlorous acid on re-epithelialization and bacterial bioburden in acute wounds: a randomized controlled trial in healthy volunteers. Acta Derm Venereol. 2022;102:adv00727. doi:10.2340/actadv.v102.1624.
Fazli MM, Kirketerp-Møller K, Sonne DP, et al. A first-in-human randomized clinical study investigating the safety and tolerability of stabilized hypochlorous acid in patients with chronic leg ulcers. Adv Wound Care. 2024. doi:10.1089/wound.2024.0040. The broader WHO submission contains numerous additional randomized and prospective human studies of HOCl in wound and tissue applications.
World Health Organization. Hypochlorous acid: antisepsis, disinfection, and wound care. Application to the 2025 WHO Model List of Essential Medicines and Model List of Essential Medicines for Children. The application assembled the extensive HOCl antimicrobial, safety, wound-care and clinical literature discussed in this article.
World Health Organization Expert Committee on Selection and Use of Essential Medicines. The Selection and Use of Essential Medicines, 2025. WHO added aqueous hypochlorous acid at ≥150 ppm to the core Model Lists of Essential Medicines for adults and children as an environmental disinfectant, explicitly distinguishing HOCl from hypochlorite products.
Republicans do not have an accomplishment problem. They have an information problem. Midterms are coming, and too many Republican voters cannot easily name even three things President Trump has accomplished. Fortunately, he has done more in a year and a half than most presidents do in four years.
The mainstream media buries the victories. Fake news pretends nothing happened. This column brings the receipts: laws, court wins, policies, agreements, and results.
A rancher who cannot name three things that went right this year is about to lose the place. The herd is growing. The fences are up. The wolves are being pushed back. But a few of the crew still complains the barn is not painted. Problems are easy to see. Wins get buried. Learn five wins. Share them. Show up and vote in the general election. You’ll have your ballot mid-October.
Taxes, Rules, and the Cost of Living
Olympia sets most of the price you pay at the pump. Washington, D.C., still sets regulations and determines whether this country produces its own energy. Inflation and high interest rates have made refinancing a ranch, a house, or a shop a hard chore. That is why this federal record matters in Eastern Washington.
Trump made the 2017 tax cuts permanent, and better. The One Big Beautiful Bill locked in the doubled standard deduction, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and 100 percent expensing. It added No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, and relief from most taxes on Social Security. Every Democrat voted “no.”
So far, he has repealed 129 regulations for every new one. Repeal of Obama’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, the foundation for vehicle mandates, is estimated to save more than $1.3 trillion. Trump also killed the federal EV mandate. People can now buy the trucks they actually drive.
Trump shifted energy dominance from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America. America now outproduces Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. After four decades of nuclear paralysis, five new reactors came online in a single year. Cheap power keeps a ranch, a mill, and a small town alive.
Law, Land, and Local Control
You cannot run a ranch, or a republic, if the gate is left open and the people in charge cannot be fired.
Trump made the border a real border again. Illegal crossings fell to their lowest level in half a century. Catch-and-release is finished. Remain in Mexico is back. Releases dropped 99.9 percent. America recorded negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in fifty years.
He signed the Laken Riley Act. Criminal illegal aliens arrested for theft, burglary, assaulting police, or crimes causing death or serious injury must be detained.
The Supreme Court ruled that the President may fire policy bureaucrats for misconduct, incompetence, or defying lawful directives. It limited nationwide injunctions. Federal employment is its smallest since 1966. DEI is out of the federal government. Hiring returns to merit.
Faith, Family, and Schools
Rural people still know there are two sexes, that girls deserve their own teams, and that parents raise the children.
Trump honors life. He already delivered the judges who overturned Roe. Since returning to office he has enforced the Hyde Amendment, expanded the Mexico City Policy, and done everything within executive power to defund Planned Parenthood.
He is working to get men out of women’s sports. The government again recognizes two sexes. He ended federal support for the chemical and surgical gender mutilation of children. Title IX is being enforced as written. He enacted the first nationwide school-choice program and launched Trump Accounts with a $1,000 seed for eligible newborns.
Ranching and Beef
This section lands in the corral. The national herd is at a 75-year low. Beef demand is up almost 10 percent in a decade. On Sept. 4 the President signed Supporting America’s Ranchers.
A voluntary “Product of USA” label now covers meat born, raised, and processed here. Interior mapped more than 2 million additional grazing acres. The Forest Service opened nearly 1.6 million acres of vacant allotments across the West. Biden-era ranch rules were withdrawn.
The Death Tax exemption was permanently doubled so a ranch can pass to the next generation. Ranchers can expense new assets in year one. Drought sales of livestock can defer capital gains. For the first time since 2018, the U.S. cattle inventory is rising. Ranchers are keeping more heifers.
Grazing on Interior land is being used to cut fine fuels and fire. USDA put $500 million toward American made fertilizer and more American beef into school meals.
The newest order puts wolves on the clock. Within 90 days, Interior must decide whether gray wolves and Mexican wolves meet recovery criteria and, if they do, start delisting or downlisting. States are to be pressed to ease lethal-take rules. Depredation pay is supposed to get faster and fairer. Emergency removal is supposed to be available when wolves threaten people or cattle.
That is a federal government treating cattle country as food security, not a scenic backdrop.
Help Us Do the Work
The receipts are in. The changes are in law, land, taxes, energy, and the herd. The midterms are turnout elections. We must send Republicans to Congress this year to keep Trump’s agenda moving.
In the 5th District, re-elect Rep. Michael Baumgartner. He has backed the turnaround on the border, taxes, and crime, and fought to keep the Lower Snake River dams. He brought home water storage in Republic and Springdale, a fire station in Fruitland, and farm research equipment in Pullman.
In the 4th District, Rep. Dan Newhouse is retiring. Amanda McKinney is running to replace him. She is a Yakima County commissioner from an ag family. She stands with Trump on the border, energy, spending, and rural communities. She has defended water rights, pushed back on one-size-fits-all farm rules, and wants Title IX enforced so girls keep their own sports.
In the 3rd District, John Braun is running to unseat Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. He is a retired Navy captain, a Chehalis manufacturer with 350 employees, and the former Senate Republican leader who fought Olympia’s tax surge. He wants a finished border, less waste, cheaper energy, American manufacturing, and police who can do the job.
Action, action, action: If possible, send at least $50 to each of these Republican candidates so the Trump wins can continue for two more years. Talk to friends, family and neighbors. Vote AS SOON AS you get your ballot. Your vote will help decide whether the wins keep coming or the wolves come back through the gate.
Don’t just sit there and yell at the TV. The harvest is ready. Help us get it in the barn.
Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the chair of the Ferry County Republican Party. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. The opinions expressed in Dangerous Rhetoric are her own. Dangerous Rhetoric is available on Substack, X, and occasionally Rumble.
SOURCES:
1)Rod D. Martin, “Trump’s Top 25 Achievements: The List Every Conservative Should Know and Use,” X, August 27, 2026, https://bit.ly/4gAtlPa
2) Executive Order, “Supporting America’s Ranchers,” The White House, September 4, 2026, https://bit.ly/4ibv9iM
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Residents of the blue zones region of Sardinia are in the spotlight for mastering the art of aging well. In a new study involving the Italian island, researchers sought to understand just what sets Sardinia apart from neighboring areas with how long they live—curious as to whether it has to do with their lifestyles, mannerisms, or something else. It was published in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology.Residents of the blue zones region of Sardinia are in the spotlight for mastering the art of aging well. SHARE ON X
The researchers studied the lives of 125 Sardinian residents, as well as residents from a non-blue zones location nearby, all between the ages of 71 to 101. Every individual received an at-home visit from the research team, who gathered data on their personalities, mental sharpness, overall health, mental well-being, and hobbies in a quiet space. According to the assessment results, Sardinian locals exhibited better stress management skills and coping mechanisms for tackling daily challenges, which correlates with an overall higher quality of health.Sardinian locals exhibited better stress management skills and coping mechanisms for tackling daily challenges, which correlates with an overall higher quality of health. SHARE ON X
In the aftermath, researchers also found that the locals of Sardinia outscored the non-residents on their open-mindedness to participating in the study itself. They navigated the trial with optimistic curiosity and a willingness to step outside of their comfort zone by trying new things.
Sardinians’ emotional competence scored even higher than non-residents in the study, which meant that they were better able to comprehend others’ feelings while clearly expressing their own. These traits were further exemplified through their daily routines and how they allocated their time: 11.3 hours invested weekly on hobbies, leisure, and activities that stimulated their minds, like reading, whereas the non-residents only invested 6.8 hours on such tasks.
Individuals who exhibited the Big Five personality traits—conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to the experience, extraversion, and neuroticism—fared better psychologically. As for the Sardinian participants, they checked all five boxes.
Johnaé De Felicis is the Founder of Awakened & Wealthy Consulting. She is an avid researcher who champions holistic wellness and conscious living, and she writes research articles, reviews, and think pieces in the areas of health, wellness, and travel/culture. Her published works have been featured on Forbes Health, Well+Good, Healthline, Therapy for Black Girls, and more.
Here it is, and it’s shorter than you’d think. As I neared the end of mapping out the science and mechanisms of Shimanishi’s mineral solution, I was forced to spend a disturbing amount of time in the agronomy, soil biology, and hydrogeology literature.
Disturbing because — what the heck is an ICU doc doing studying agriculture?
Easy. That’s where the science and data on Shimanishi’s minerals lived. There was no medical literature to read. So I had no choice but to develop real working expertise in soil structure, soil biology, and agriculture to understand how plants, soil, microbes, and minerals interact, and how water connects all of them.
I hereby confer upon myself an AI-Assisted Internet Degree in Agronomy, Soil Biology, and Geohydrology.
I stole that line from myself. For years, whenever a patient turned up having read deeply enough to propose a better option than the one I’d landed on — rare, but it happened — I’d say: “Which Internet School of Medicine did you go to? I’m impressed.” They loved it.
As it turned out, it also had an agronomy department.
Anyway, that is the whole story of the agronomy charts. There was no plan. I went where the evidence was, and the evidence was in the dirt.
Now let me tell you what getting there actually took.
A Trail I Never Could Have Imagined
Here is what made this year unlike anything I’ve ever done, and I have devoted enormous stretches of my life to researching narrow questions in medicine. The evidence behind this particular mineral extract was everywhere except a medical journal, a textbook, or a database.
It wasn’t in journals or anything peer-reviewed. The vast majority came from two Japanese agronomy technical volumes I had to have translated (by AI, of course). The rest were institutional agricultural studies or reports from a handful of countries — Mexico, Korea, China — unpublished and held in company or institutional archives. Then a handful of commissioned studies from distributors of Themarox-derived products, saved in Word files, or even relayed to me in an email with a couple of soil test reports. Oh, and let’s not forget the three Soviet-era research institute documents, which I also had to have translated from Russian, whose sophisticated in vivo and human studies remain unpublished and, in one case, didn’t even list the authors. Then the “Holy Grail,” a single, peer-reviewed, journal-published study on the effects of Themarox on the antioxidant activity of buckwheat sprouts.
It was the most bizarre evidence base I’d ever encountered.
As much as I want to hand this to an AI and get a slick graphic back to show you, I won’t. So here is the bulleted list of what I actually studied this year:
The early mineral pioneers — Weston Price, Elmer Heinrich, Linus Pauling.
The mystics of water — Viktor Schauberger’s vortices and the primordial sea of René Quinton.
Mineral springs and healing waters — their history, their importance, and their recurrence across essentially every tradition and culture on Earth.
Origin-of-life science — Lane, Russell, Hansma and others; deep-sea hydrothermal vents and layered silicate structures.
A century and a half of mineral lock-up in our soils and the falling mineral content of our food, traceable back to the Broadbalk experiment of the 1860s.
How the essential minerals were identified in the 1930s — largely by feeding rats single-mineral-deficient diets to see whether they’d collapse into illness. If they didn’t collapse, or if we couldn’t measure the element at the time: non-essential. That’s the standard. The rest of the soil’s mineral inventory has been almost entirely ignored by modern science ever since.
The deep evidence bases for the importance of boron, lithium, and copper in treating and preventing numerous human diseases, while exactly none of them are routinely tested for or recommended for supplementation, despite a near-universal inability for human populations to hit even the falsely low daily allowances.
Heavy metals, which I learned to divide into “industrial” versus “essential” (half our essential elements are heavy metals), including a deep dive into the non-toxicity and ubiquity of aluminum in our food and water.
Many weeks spent inside Gerald Pollack, Gilbert Ling, and Franz Hofmeister’s work, plus critically evaluating their dissenting water chemistry papers, which were the most scientifically dense material I have ever tried to navigate.
Modern water treatment — its goals, what’s in our water, what never gets tested or removed, and how much is uncontaminated, untested, and poorly mineralized when it comes out of the tap.
The cost of empty water – the proliferation of desalination plants, RO systems, and the little-known financial and physiological consequences of drinking demineralized water.
The geological inheritcance of water:
Total immersion into the state of the world’s water, above ground and below: how its quality and chemistry have been degraded by industry and agriculture over the last hundred years, how rapidly it is being extracted and how it is beginning to actually run out in specific places, and what those places are now doing to keep people alive — and how almost none of it registers in the world’s media, because it is dwarfed and buried inside the larger, obsessive climate change story.
What It Cost
Over what became almost exactly a year, I lost a not insignificant number of subscribers (especially paid) to Medical Musings. Some left because the direction and scope of my research no longer interested them. One wrote, memorably, “I am not that into water.” Fair enough.
Others left for worse reasons. When the research for The Blueprint of Lifetook me into a small, discrete set of ancient Hermetic texts, some recoiled, convinced I was delving into the occult and practicing dark arts or some nonsense. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could have been further from the truth. I was following evidence about minerals and water back into antiquity, and into fewer than a handful of densely cryptic texts. When that path continued past those texts and into Scripture, it brought some of them back to the fold. But not enough. Oh well.
It isn’t that I didn’t care that I was hemorrhaging paid readers. I simply didn’t have a choice. Writers write about what captivates them. Yes, I had departed from the hard-charging, enraged-dissident health establishment attacks, interspersed with transformative research on the efficacy of repurposed and “alternative” therapeutics for COVID, cancer, and post-COVID vaccine syndrome — the work I’d become known for. But it was still a search for health. Just across physical, ecological, and eventually spiritual realms instead of only the first one.
Why I Couldn’t Keep Fighting
What really happened is that I could no longer keep up the daily intensity of fighting, uncovering, and exposing the fraud and lies we all lived through in COVID. Not because that work stopped mattering; I just couldn’t sustain interest in it any longer. I felt I had reached as many as I could reach, and further efforts were simply validating and satisfying those who already knew rather than continuing to enlighten the unenlightened. Plus, so many were still doing it so well.
How long can one man scream about the toxicity and lethality of the Covid (and all) vaccines, the efficacy of the innumerable repurposed drugs suppressed and distorted by mainstream media, medical journals, public health agencies, and universities, the corrupting practices of Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies, the devastation of illness I see all around me, and the horror and the unfairness of all of it?
The work I put into the first four years of Medical Musings effectively turned me into an expert on Disinformation tactics. But teaching the public about disinformation all the time just… stopped exciting or inspiring me as it once did.
I started to feel like “Johnny One-Note,” plucking the same sound on the same instrument over and over. As I started to realize this, I also saw my admiration soar for friends who could sustain that intensity and focus — like Steve Kirsch, bless his heart. Steve is the quintessential dog with a bone. Five-plus years now of daily, indefatigable effort, first exposing the COVID vaccine catastrophe, then the century-long vaccine myth, and finally, proving to the world that autism is, in the end, simply vaccine-induced encephalopathy. The world needs more guys like Steve.
Once I exposed how deeply the COVID fraud ran through so many of our institutions, some really interesting people started finding me—a cadre who had been awake far longer than I had, some reaching out directly, others simply appearing in my circles. That is when my education moved past disinformation tactics and into considerably darker territory.
It began with a documentary, From JFK to 9/11: A Rich Man’s Trick, and what I learned afterward—that some of the most consequential events in modern history were false flags: Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, and more.
So the history books are lying too? I remember thinking.
From there it ran into the long history of secret societies — the Illuminati, the Masons, the Rothschilds — and into what people born into that kind of power, or handed it, appear to turn to once fame and money stop doing anything for them. Pedophilia. Trafficking. Sacrifice.
Eye-opening, mind-boggling, world-perspective-changing. But then my interest in that waned too, and fast. Too depressing, too predictable, and ultimately too powerless to do anything about. I wasn’t learning anything that would help me live a better life or be a better person. Wiser and savvier, maybe. But nothing to build a life around.
So I got bored and exhausted with it all. Tired of the lies, the fraud, the corruption, and frankly, tired of learning about the pure evil in the world.
That doesn’t mean I’ll never drop the gloves to fight evil and fraud and lies again. I still will when it’s needed — like the post on our legal win over California Attorney General Rob “Bastard” Bonta, or the piece I wrote with attorney Aaron Siri about the insane suppression and misrepresentation of the two Texan Mennonite girls who did NOT die of measles. But those are going to be the exception now, instead of the norm they were for years.
Yeesh. When I look back over the first 350 essays I wrote here — man, do they bang that drum, louder and more powerfully and more accurately over time. I understand that is what a lot of you came to like me for. I just don’t like me doing it all the time anymore.
So if you don’t want to stay, I get it. There’s not enough time in the day to read everybody, especially if other things interest you more.
What Saved Me
The real reason I couldn’t do it anymore is that I got saved. Not in the way you’re thinking; it was more like being intellectually saved. It started with Shimanishi’s extract: fifteen solitary years of labor, finished in 1977. Soon after encountering it, I began watching its various applications produce responses across biological kingdoms.
A lilac bush sprayed with Themarox-treated water exploded into bloom, while the one catching less of the spray only produced three or four sparse blooms.
One family’s Christmas cactus, inherited from their grandmother, suddenly flowering after receiving Themarox-treated water— something they hadn’t seen in fifty years.
A potato thriving in a glass of Themarox-treated water while the one submerged in regular tap water rotted.
Then I came across Russian researchers describing rats hydrated with Themarox-treated-water as becoming more active, with shinier, healthier fur than the rats given ordinary water. Then I received testimonials from colleagues of patients who reported things like increased energy, improved vision, thicker hair, and faster-growing toenails on concentrated dosing protocols.
So I found myself pulled deeper and deeper into a single question: what is this? How does it work? Why does it work? And what else can it do?
The Book I Thought I Was Writing
My first impression was simple: it worked by supplying minerals that biology had become deficient in. So I wrote a book about the history, the science, and the importance of minerals in health and life. I called it From Volcanoes to Vitality. I put it up for sale. And I was done — three intense months, start to finish. That was mid-October of 2025.
I still feel guilty about keeping those early purchasers waiting so long. I’ve sent progress updates and sincere apologies along the way, but I suspect more than a few of them concluded they’d been grifted.
Last week is the week I proved them wrong. Sort of – the printer just reported a two-week delay, ugh.
But here’s what happened. Every time the manuscript was being readied for the printer, another door opened. Another insight arose. Another inexplicable piece or set of data appeared. And back down the rabbit hole I went, accompanied by my research collaborator and mineral expert, Matt Bakos.
That happened over and over for the next year.
The Work
Eighteen-plus-hour days at my desk, in between seeing patients. Obsessively. For a year.
No other stretch of work in this admittedly highly productive ICU doctor’s career ever approached it. Building the FLCCC with Paul in the early years of COVID, then fending off the global media attacks while losing our careers and reputations, none of it came close because this was more solitary, more focused, more intense, with only a single collaborator at my side. Matt was indispensable, central even, but he also did not write a word of the books.
The scope of the work nearly buried me. There were weeks I spent down inside the electron transport chain, studying the way iron and sulfur hand electrons down the line, while Matt kept showing me yet another process that depended on yet another mineral: every organ, every enzyme, every receptor I looked at seemed to lead back to the same handful of elements, and the deeper I went, the more granular and unmanageable it became. I had a large story I was trying to tell, and I kept getting stuck in the weeds of mechanisms I couldn’t simplify or skip, and the frustration was constant.
It was harder still because I was doing it in the cracks of a busy working life. Until the final month, I carried my patient schedule, and the two could not both have me. Every time the writing finally caught fire, it was time to see a patient, and every time I was with patients, the book was pulling at the back of my mind. I felt divided in a way I could not resolve, and I gave neither side the whole of my attention as often as I wanted to.
Why I Stopped Seeing Patients
I should be open about why I stopped, because the timing was no coincidence. Two things were happening at once, and they pulled in the same direction.
The first was that my inspiration for tending to patients, which had carried me for decades, was quietly running down — not into bitterness, and not into any failure of care, but into a kind of completion, as though that particular well had given what it had to give.
The second was harder to admit, and I know how it sounds. The pull toward this work — toward the minerals, the research, and the task of carrying what Shimanishi achieved out into the world — had stopped feeling like just another in a series of research rabbit holes I had gone down since opening my practice, and started feeling like something I was simply meant to do. I am wary of men who believe they are called to the world, yet I cannot describe what happened to me over these months in simpler terms.
The honest version is that I was finished, spiritually and intellectually, with one kind of work, and overtaken by another. For a while I tried to carry both. A man doing that does neither well. So I stopped.
My only regret is that I did not do it sooner.
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I also started a company — which turned out to be a full-time education in everything that no one teaches a physician.
How much warehouse space you need, and how much inventory to put in it. Where to find bottling and labeling equipment. How to hire a warehouse manager. What the FTC, the EPA, and the FDA each require on a label — three different answers to the same question. How to argue with UPS and USPS about a broken package, and who eats the cost of a return.
And how to build a customer service department, which in our case was initially very easy — Lisa K.
However, I have to say that Matt and his wife Lisa (“Lisa B”) made all of it considerably less painful than it should have been.
We also lived out of suitcases for a good stretch. Even though I have only a small circle of friends here in Sarasota, and my only leisure is the occasional meal out, home dinner invitation, or a round of golf — err, half a round of golf; who has time for eighteen holes? — I felt I needed complete solitude and disengagement.
So, despite the irony of being Swedish and famously intolerant of cold, Lisa agreed to be snowed into a cabin in Montana with me for two months, pregnant and far from her friends and her routines, while I wrote eighteen hours a day and lost all sense of time.
The Wild Looking Back
One memory I will always keep is that the cabin came with a bag of deer feed and permission to use it.
I put some out the second day and watched them come, and that was that. It became the thing I did, and something I had never done in my life. Every time I looked up from the desk and saw them on the slope, I was out of the chair before I had decided to be — Lisa can confirm this, and found it considerably funnier than I did. .
There were a dozen or more deer in the area, but two of them, a mother and I presume a daughter, came alone, and most often by far. I named them Margie and Bambi. They would stop eating and look up, and we would hold each other’s gaze for a while, and I have no scientific word for what passed between us.
Over the weeks I set the feed closer and closer to the cabin, until they were eating a few feet from where I stood, shivering on the back deck in my slippers. I had never been so close, for so long, to such majestic animals. The energetic connection was intense.
I would then come back in, regaling Lisa with the closeness I felt, the intimacy, the joy, the beauty. It was weird, a former two-pack-a-day chain-smoking, drug addicted, foul-mouthed Long Islander pulmonologist going on and on about the relationship he was forming with two deer in Montana.
Soon after, I started coming back in swearing, all upset because a different, more dominant pair were muscling in and driving Margie and Bambi away. So I stopped putting food out until they let Margie and Bambi come back alone. Which they did. Often. The whole time I was there.
I will never forget the sadness and longing for them that I felt in the days after I left back to… Florida.
At one point during that time I actually asked an AI why deer make people feel like that. It gave me a long and serious answer. I read the whole thing. The short version was that a deer offers nothing but presence. It is vulnerable and entirely wild, and when it stops and looks at you, the usual chatter falls away. For a moment, life itself seems to be looking back. Some people call that wonder. Some call it God.
I chuckle, thinking back to the fact that I spent much of that time buried in electron transport chains and mineral deficiencies, but what I remember most about Montana were those two deer.
And then, at the end of the year, our son Lazlo arrived — the one deadline in all of this that was never going to move.
The Crisis I Wasn’t Looking For
Somewhere towards the end of that self-assigned dissertation, I stumbled onto a largely man-made global food and water crisis that has little to do with climate change. It began subtly around the year 2000. It is now accelerating rapidly. And the world’s leading scientists and policymakers barely discuss it.
The crisis began slowly, and almost imperceptibly, driven by the progressive degradation of the world’s water quality and chemistry, a result of decades of NPK fertilizer being laid down over nearly the entire world’s farmland, compounded by reckless corporate industrial pollution over the same decades.
The massive 2.4% annual agricultural yield gains produced by the Green Revolution, which helped support a massive rise in the human population, started to slow. And slow. As they slowed, for the first time in decades, food prices started to rise. Something they are doing faster and faster of late.
That crisis is underway and being documented in the agronomy literature.
But then I stumbled onto the upcoming water bankruptcy crisis, documented in the hydrology literature, which will soon compound the unfolding food crisis. Water shortages are both increasingly projected and popping up across the world, arriving faster and larger, with each region and aquifer opening up more rabbit holes for me, like the slow-moving car crash that is the Colorado River Basin’s Lake Mead and Powell, and how Saudi Arabia effectively ran out of groundwater so they started borrowing (effectively stealing) Arizona’s.
But the Indus Basin is the one that keeps me up at night. Indian Punjab grows a tenth of India’s rice on water it does not have, and 72 percent of its irrigated land now runs on tubewells. As the table drops, shallow wells go dry, so farmers drill deeper and fit stronger pumps—each round pulling harder on the same shrinking reserve. It is a race to the bottom with a literal bottom. India’s Central Ground Water Board projects that, at current extraction rates, Punjab will exhaust its usable groundwater in the upper 300 meters by roughly 2039.
That is within the working life of a farmer planting there today.
Why There Are Two Books On the Crisis and Not One
That crisis is what Earth’s Living Water builds toward and explores in depth. But then I realized something uncomfortable: a message that urgent, affecting that much of the planet, was never going to travel as fast or as far as a 715-page, 70-chapter, 200,000-word book in an unwieldy 7×10 inch format.
Hence, The Silent Aquifer. Short. Fast. Hard-hitting. Built to be read in a couple of sittings and handed to someone else. Same emergency. Different weapon.
The Strangest Turn of All
And then there was the side excursion, if I can even call it that, given that it produced an entire book.
While chasing the mineral and water trail backward, Matt kept pointing to unimaginably cryptic descriptions in certain ancient texts that he had encountered in his own twenty-year journey, which, once deciphered, depicted three things at once with striking precision: the steps by which Shimanishi’s extract is produced, the properties it holds, and the kind of man capable of producing it. Discovering a 500-year-old Hermetic text that described Shimanishi’s character to a T really spooked me. I still haven’t gotten over that one.
I never could have imagined writing a book on those subjects. I stopped posting most of that work here, because I knew my readers couldn’t hold a thread that I myself could barely hold.
And then the search moved past the texts. And to God.
I want to be careful about how I say this, because it is the largest claim I have ever made in public and it deserves more than one sentence.
What I found is that those ancient texts appear to record knowledge of the hydrogeologic cycles that a growing number of modern scientists now believe birthed and regenerated life on Earth: aluminosilicate architectures visited by iron and sulfur — none of it possible without water.
Those cycles, and water’s central role in them, are pointed to sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically across a number of ancient texts, and above all in Scripture — written by people who should have had no way of knowing any of it.
Which is what brought me to the Blueprint‘s ultimate conclusion. Knowledge like that could only have come from the Architect of the thing described. I suddenly saw clearly that the world we live in was designed and governed by a physical architecture of remarkable order and elegance—and by a moral architecture running alongside it. Most importantly, I came to the understanding that the more closely we live in accordance with both, the better off we all are, individually and communally.
I still can’t quite believe I just wrote that paragraph. I am aware of how it reads. I made the argument carefully and at length in the book precisely because it cannot be made carelessly and in brief, and if you want to fight me on it, fight me on the pages where I actually built it.
The Return
If you’re still with me and haven’t left thinking this man is evincing such delusions of grandeur that you can’t stomach another word (I get it), but there’s one more thing.
The whole journey, with all of its stops and starts and reversals and wrong turns, had also delivered a way out. I call it the Return: a feasible, viable path to averting the same catastrophe I’d spent the year diagnosing.
Three things make it plausible at scale. Shimanishi’s mineral solution is extracted from biotite, which makes up roughly seven percent of the Earth’s crust. It can be produced by an unpatented process. And it is catalytic, which is what matters most here: tiny amounts condition enormous volumes of water. Whatever else turns out to be true, this is not a scarce answer, and it is not a proprietary one.
Now, where I think it would actually matter.
Agriculture runs on two kinds of water. Green water is rain, held in the soil, feeding crops where they stand. Blue water is what we pump — rivers, reservoirs, and the aquifers we are steadily emptying. The crisis in my books is, at bottom, a blue water crisis: for fifty years we have compensated for green water’s underperformance by pumping harder, and the pumps will soon be running out.
Which is why the largest opportunity, and the one the evidence supports best, is raising yields on rain-fed land. If green water can be made to produce substantially more, the demand on blue water falls — and the world can grow what it needs without draining the aquifers beneath it. That, more than anything else, is what I mean by the Return.
The second is reclaiming wastewater, which matters most in the blue-water regions under the heaviest stress.
The third is bringing sodic and saline ground back into production — land already farmed to death, in either kind of region.
The fourth is the broadest and the least defined: better yields generally, higher nutrient density, more productive aquaculture. More food per acre, more nutrition per calorie, and perhaps less land under the plow to begin with.
I want to be honest that this is where my certainty ends. I do not know how far any of it goes. What I believe is that if this material’s potential were fully explored and properly validated, the uses for repairing, restoring, and preserving what we have left would be innumerable, especially when focused on and plotted by far greater minds than I have.
One Conclusion
One year. Thousands of hours. The end of a twenty-five-year medical career, and the abandonment of very nearly every social and living habit I had built my adult life around. All of it produced a single conclusion. Just one. Here it is.
The living water that has sustained this Earth since its beginning has been altered. Not yet depleted, although that will soon come, but altered in its chemistry, and faster than the planet’s own systems can answer. And the way back is a rock. Shimanishi’s mineral solution, and the biotite it is drawn from — a mineral so ordinary it lies under nearly everyone reading this — is a pathway to restoration. I would use the word salvation, while also acknowledging how insane it sounds when used quickly or loosely.
Because the problem underneath the Earth’s fields and aquifers is, at bottom, the degradation of water chemistry. And that is precisely what these minerals restore: binding and removing the thousands of chemicals humans have manufactured into that water, while returning to it the redox-balancing, ion-exchanging, and hydrating properties it needs to fully support the biology living on top of it.
A problem in water chemistry. Answered by rock.
Which is, in the end, the oldest arrangement on Earth.
What A Year
Publishing three books feels like reaching the first peak. It isn’t the summit — I have a feeling there are more of those out there than I can see from here. But this one feels good.
That’s the story. A year of eighteen-hour days, one collaborator, three books, a company, a lot of suitcases, a baby, a lot of lost subscribers, and a research trail I could not have envisioned, imagined, or come close to anticipating — even after devoting immense stretches of my life to researching medicine.
It was also the year I ended my medical career. I retired my patient panel, set down the bedside, and gave the hours to soil and water instead. I did not see that coming. I don’t regret it.
To those of you who stayed through a year in which I published in incoherent spurts, disappearing down one rabbit hole and prematurely reappearing from another: thank you. You paid for this year. It’s yours as much as mine.
To those who bought From Volcanoes to Vitality back in October of 2025 and waited: it eventually grew into three books. I hope that’s a fair trade.
And to the reader who left because he wasn’t that into water — no hard feelings. I understand completely. But let me tell you what I’d tell him.
There is no such thing as not being into water.
You are about sixty percent water. Seventy percent of all the fresh water humanity withdraws goes to growing what you ate today. It is the only subject I have ever worked on that has no out-group — nothing it doesn’t touch, nobody it doesn’t reach, no one who gets to sit this one out.
I previously spent four years writing about a fight that came down, in the end, to a handful of drugs and the people who buried them. That work mattered. It still does, and it is still true.
This is bigger. This is the ground and the water beneath the food that is beneath everyone.
I’m going to keep following it, and I’m going to keep reporting it here — the aquifer crisis almost no one is covering, the evidence base I’m still uncovering, and whatever the next collapsed theory ends up teaching me. I opened the lid on this story. I’m not closing it.
So if it matters to you, stay. And if you know someone who drinks from a well, or farms, or who has simply wondered what is actually in the glass in front of them — send them this.
Onward.
— Pierre
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.
Back in 2020, Pew Research Center surveyed more than 11,000 Americans. Political scientist Zach Goldberg subsequently examined the underlying data and broke the results down by age, sex, race, and political ideology.
What he found was rather remarkable.
Among white women ages 18 to 29 who identified as liberal, 56.3% reported that a doctor or other health-care provider had diagnosed them with a mental health condition.
Not 15%.
Not 25%.
Fifty-six percent.
For white moderate women of the same age, the number was 28.4%.
For white conservative women, 27.3%.
In other words, young white liberal women were more than twice as likely as their conservative counterparts to report having received a mental health diagnosis.
Now, correlation is not causation. Perhaps liberals are simply more willing to seek psychiatric care. Perhaps conservatives are less willing to admit that they have a problem. Perhaps political ideology attracts people with particular personality traits rather than creating those traits. All perfectly reasonable possibilities.
But here is where it gets interesting.
Five years later, the numbers have not exactly moved in a reassuring direction.
Gallup found that only 15% of American women ages 18–29 surveyed from 2020 through 2024 described their mental health as excellent. In 2010–2014, that number had been 48%.
That is not a small decline. That is a collapse.
And the ideological divide is still there.
The 2024 American Family Survey found that only 12% of liberal women ages 18–40 described themselves as “completely satisfied” with their lives.
Among moderate women: 28%.
Among conservative women: 37%.
Liberal women were also nearly three times as likely as conservative women to report feeling lonely several times a week or more: 29% versus 11%.
So perhaps endlessly telling young women that they live in an oppressive society, that the world is on the verge of climate catastrophe, that words are violence, that disagreement is dangerous, that our President is evil, that the patriarchy is lurking behind every corner, that Western civilization is fundamentally corrupt, and that their personal unhappiness is caused by vast structural forces over which they have virtually no control is not actually a recipe for human flourishing.
Who could have guessed?
There is an important caveat. A 2025 study found that some of the apparent liberal-conservative mental-health divide may reflect differences in how people think and talk about “mental health.” When researchers simply asked people about their mood, rather than their mental health, much of the ideological difference disappeared.
Fair enough.
But that doesn’t explain away the extraordinary collapse in reported well-being among young women generally, nor does it make the life-satisfaction and loneliness data disappear. Maybe the question isn’t whether liberalism causes mental illness.
Maybe the more interesting question is whether a culture built around grievance, victimhood, fear and powerlessness is particularly attractive to unhappy people, makes unhappy people unhappier, or both. That seems like a question worth asking. Even if asking it makes someone very, very upset.
There is, however, an uncomfortable counterpoint to all this discussion of female unhappiness and mental illness. Men are far more likely to actually die by suicide. In the United States, the male suicide rate is nearly four times the female rate, and men account for roughly four out of every five suicide deaths. The disparity exists globally as well. Perhaps that exposes a deeper truth about the modern cult of victimhood. We have created a culture extraordinarily skilled at teaching certain groups to name every grievance, diagnose every distress, identify every oppressor and demand that society recognize their pain, while other forms of suffering remain remarkably easy to ignore. Young women may be reporting extraordinary levels of anxiety, depression and psychiatric diagnosis, but men are quietly killing themselves at vastly higher rates.
That does not diminish women’s suffering. It suggests that our entire framework for understanding suffering may be badly distorted. A society obsessed with determining who is the victim and who is the oppressor can become remarkably blind to the human being who doesn’t fit the approved narrative, particularly when that human being is male.
There is another possibility here that deserves far more attention: the diagnosis itself has become part of the epidemic. When more than half of young women in a political demographic report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition, the appropriate response is not simply to declare that half the population is mentally ill. It is to ask what the hell the health-care system is doing. Psychiatry has steadily expanded the boundaries of pathology, medicalizing distress, grief, anxiety, loneliness, adolescent turmoil, and ordinary difficulty as diagnosable disease. A system that can convert normal human suffering into a billing code, a prescription, and a lifelong medical identity should not be treated as a neutral observer of this crisis. At some point, an exploding diagnosis rate stops being proof of exploding disease and starts becoming evidence that the diagnostic machinery itself may be broken.
Consider what we are now being asked to accept as normal. The 2026 Lancet Global Burden of Disease study estimates that 1.17 billion human beings, roughly one person in seven on Earth, are living with a mental disorder, and mental disorders now account for 17.3 percent of all years lived with disability worldwide, making them the single largest source of nonfatal disability. Women carry an even greater burden than men, with the female age-standardized mental-disorder burden about 18 percent higher. This is insane, not because hundreds of millions of people do not genuinely suffer from serious psychiatric illness, but because at some point a civilization has to ask what these numbers actually mean. Did humanity suddenly become catastrophically mentally ill, or have we built a medical system that increasingly converts sadness, fear, loneliness, grief, adolescent turmoil and difficulty coping with life into psychiatric pathology? When one in seven people on the planet fits into the modeled category of mental disorder, the diagnostic framework itself deserves scrutiny. A medical system cannot simply keep expanding the definition of sickness and then point to the resulting mountain of sickness as proof that it was right.
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Toxic Feminism
There was a feminism that told women they should have choices. Then there is the more modern version of feminism that increasingly seems to tell women which choices an enlightened woman is supposed to make. Career is achievement. Marriage is dependence. Motherhood is unpaid labor. Men are potential oppressors. Traditional families are suspect. Finances should always be kept separate, plan for a divorce, financial independence is a must. Independence is liberation, and needing another human being is somehow weakness. Delay marriage. Delay children. Establish the career. Find yourself. Become independent. Never settle. Put yourself first.
There is just one rather awkward problem with this prescription for female happiness: human beings are profoundly social animals, and the scientific literature keeps rediscovering the importance of precisely the relationships that modern culture has spent decades teaching women not to need.
Femininity is Real
There is also an uncomfortable biological reality that modern ideology would prefer to treat as an inconvenience: women are not simply smaller men with different reproductive organs. Progesterone is central to female reproduction, but its effects extend into the brain and behavior. Human research has associated higher progesterone with affiliation, social bonding, sensitivity to relationships and even greater willingness to sacrifice for another person.
Estrogen, particularly estradiol, does far more than regulate reproduction. It acts throughout the female brain, interacting with oxytocin and other neuroendocrine systems involved in mood, sexuality, emotional processing, social attachment, and stress. Together with progesterone and oxytocin, estrogen contributes to the biological systems underlying bonding, maternal behavior, and caregiving. And that capacity for nurturing does not suddenly switch off when there is no baby in the room.
Women show stronger tendencies toward caregiving, empathy, and relational investment, although there is enormous individual variation. Biology is not destiny, but neither is it imaginary. To dismiss these deeply rooted female tendencies as merely products of the patriarchy, or to teach women that caring for and depending upon others is somehow incompatible with independence, comes at a real psychological cost, and we are witnessing this worldwide. A feminism that requires women to deny important parts of their own biology is a strange definition of female liberation.
The female impulse toward attachment, relationship and nurturing cannot simply be dismissed as a patriarchal social construct. There is biology underneath it. A culture that tells women that caring for others is servitude, that motherhood is an impediment to achievement, and that putting another human being ahead of oneself represents oppression may therefore be fighting something considerably older than the patriarchy. It may be fighting female biology itself.
Psychology even has a validated instrument called the Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory, developed specifically to measure hostile prejudices and stereotypes about men. And the hostility is measurable. In a subsequent study of 488 college students, women scored significantly higher than men on the instrument’s Hostility Toward Men scale, 2.76 versus 2.25 on a 0-to-5 scale.
How a broader culture came to normalize the sweeping negative generalizations about men, male sexuality, male power and masculinity that would immediately be recognized as prejudice if the sexes were reversed is an interesting question. Hostility between the sexes is not liberation. It poisons precisely the trust, affection and intimacy upon which successful relationships depend.
The evidence surrounding work, family and mental health should make us reconsider what women have been sold as liberation. In one nationally representative study of 4,714 working women, high work-family conflict was associated with 2.29 times the odds of depressive symptoms, with some of the strongest associations occurring among younger, highly educated, higher-income and never-married women. Studies of female physicians and longitudinal studies of working women tell much the same story: when professional life and family life are placed into sustained conflict, mental health suffers.
The mistake was never telling women that they could become physicians, scientists, executives, farmers, entrepreneurs or anything else they were capable of becoming. Of course they could, and they should have been free to do so.
The mistake was turning independence itself into the objective, as though dependence upon people who love us were some sort of character defect. A husband and wife depend upon one another. Children depend upon parents. Parents eventually depend upon their children. Families are elaborate networks of mutual obligation. That isn’t oppression. It is much of what gives human life meaning.
And perhaps most poisonous of all is the idea that relations between men and women should be understood primarily as a contest for power. Teach a generation of women to approach half of humanity with suspicion, to interpret ordinary disagreement through the language of oppression, and to view compromise as surrender, and then act surprised when relationships become difficult. Whatever one chooses to call that worldview, it is a miserable foundation upon which to build intimacy.
Girls do not generally sit through a classroom lesson entitled Marriage Is Bad. The message is subtler than that. From school through college, the language surrounding female success increasingly emphasizes independence, autonomy, empowerment, career, individual rights and self-realization. What is striking is what receives far less emphasis: interdependence, marriage, sacrifice, obligation, motherhood, building a household, choosing a good husband and creating a stable family.
Dependence itself has acquired an almost pathological meaning, as though needing a husband, wife, children or extended family represents personal failure rather than the normal condition of human beings. A girl is repeatedly asked what career she wants when she grows up. How often is she asked what kind of marriage she hopes to build, what kind of mother she hopes to become, or what sacrifices a lasting relationship will require? The lesson does not have to be written on the blackboard to be learned: success is something you achieve individually; family is something you fit around it later, and you would be stupid not to be financially independent before having children, cause men generally aren’t to be trusted to hang around long enough to raise a family.
There is an enormous difference between telling a woman you do not have to marry or have children and telling her, explicitly or implicitly, that marriage and motherhood represent lesser ambitions than professional status. Biology also imposes a deadline that corporate advancement does not. A promotion can arrive at 42. A first child may not. Women deserve to know that when they are 22, not discover it when they are 39.
In our lives, we know two women in their thirties who are in the process of freezing their eggs; evidently, they believe that when they are forty or fifty, they will be in a better position to have a child? And we have another single friend, who at fifty, has decided she has aged out of ever being a mother. All of these women are college-educated professionals, never married, and are coming to terms with their biological clocks running out.
A culture that encourages women to postpone permanent relationships, prioritize professional status, regard dependence as weakness, and treat men principally as a source of danger or oppression should at least be willing to examine the results. If the promised liberation ends with unprecedented numbers of young women anxious, depressed, medicated, lonely and unable to form the families they later discover they wanted, declaring the experiment an unquestionable success is not feminism.
It is marketing.
The Big Lie
And then there is the part nobody is supposed to mention: this arrangement is extraordinarily good for industry. The intact family is an economic institution as well as a social one. Husbands and wives share labor. Grandparents care for grandchildren. Families cook meals, repair things, care for the sick and elderly, grow food, teach children, share houses, lend money, pass down skills and provide an enormous amount of economic activity that never appears on a corporate balance sheet. Break those bonds apart and suddenly nearly everything has to be purchased. Two adults maintaining two households need two rents or mortgages, two sets of utilities, two kitchens and twice the household goods.
Put both parents into full-time employment and families purchase more childcare, prepared food, transportation and other substitutes for work once performed within the home. Send rural children hundreds of miles away to college and then into metropolitan corporate employment, and another generation is separated from grandparents, land, community, and the informal economy of extended family. None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only incentives. And corporations benefit enormously from this arrangement.
Corporations benefit when people become workers first, consumers second, and family members somewhere farther down the list. The Big Lie was convincing women (and men) that exchanging dependence upon people who loved them for dependence upon employers, banks, universities, childcare companies, and the consumer economy was somehow independence. The destruction of family and community did not make people independent. It merely changed whom they depended upon, and unlike a family, the corporation collected the dividends.
The Result is “Mental Illness”
Going back to those numbers at the beginning of this essay, perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. When 56.3 percent of young white liberal women report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition, the immediate assumption is that something must be terribly wrong with these women. Maybe instead, something is terribly wrong with the culture they have been raised in.
For decades, young people, and young women in particular, have been sold a remarkably destructive definition of success. Leave home. Go deeply into debt for college. Build the career. Delay marriage. Delay children. Treat dependence upon another person as weakness. Treat compromise as surrender. Regard traditional institutions with suspicion. Learn to identify grievances. Put yourself first. And when the loneliness, anxiety, purposelessness and unhappiness arrive, there is an enormous medical industry waiting to provide the diagnosis and, frequently, the prescription.
Then we marvel at the epidemic of mental illness.
Perhaps a significant portion of what we are calling a mental-health crisis is actually a crisis of meaning, belonging and human connection. A pill cannot provide a husband or wife. Therapy cannot manufacture grandchildren around the Thanksgiving table. A diagnosis cannot replace friendship, faith, family, community, useful work, children who need you, parents who depend upon you, or the knowledge that one’s life matters to people other than oneself. Medicine can treat disease. It is considerably less capable of treating a culture that has systematically stripped away many of the institutions that once gave ordinary people purpose.
And men have hardly escaped this experiment. While women report extraordinary levels of anxiety, depression and psychiatric diagnosis, men are killing themselves at vastly higher rates. That should be the flashing red warning light. The ideology of victimhood may teach women to describe their suffering endlessly while feminist teachings overlook the suffering of those assigned the role of “oppressor.”
None of this means returning women to some imaginary 1950s existence or denying anyone education, independence or a career. It means admitting something considerably more radical in 2026: human beings need one another. Men need women. Women need men. Children need parents. Parents need children. Families need communities, and communities need people who remain invested in them. Independence was never the highest human good.
That may be the real Big Lie. We were told that liberation meant needing fewer people, carrying fewer obligations and being free to put ourselves first.
Instead, we became more dependent upon employers, corporations, universities, government programs, therapists, pharmaceutical companies and the marketplace to provide things that families and communities once provided for one another.
And now 1.17 billion people are estimated to be living with a mental disorder.
Perhaps the strangest response imaginable is to look at that number and conclude that the problem is simply that humanity needs more mental-health treatment.
Maybe people need more life.
More family. More marriage. More children. More friendship. More community. More responsibility. More people depending upon them, and more people upon whom they can depend.
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John Wright@johncwright2001Just a reminder to the blackpillers: Negative net migration for the first time in 100 years. 6 million illegal aliens gone. Foreign-born population down by 3 million; Laken Riley Act signed into law. Catch-and-release ended. Record-low border encounters; Violent crime…7:55 AM · Sep 7, 2026 · 111K Views154 Replies · 983 Reposts · 4.1K Likes
Eric Daugherty@EricLDaugh🚨 BREAKING: The Trump administration just filed to have the US Census ONLY COUNT CITIZENS and permanent residents — not illegal aliens — which could carry massive consequences for the Electoral College and US House representation 2030 CENSUS IS HUGE. It will help determine the …
7:22 PM · Sep 9, 2026 · 444K Views572 Replies · 4.86K Reposts · 24.2K Likes
Peter St Onge, Ph.D.@profstongeExcluding illegals from the census should have happened a long time ago. Visiting tourists shouldn’t be in the census, and visiting criminals shouldn’t either.
zerohedge @zerohedgeTrump Admin Proposes Excluding Illegal Immigrants From Census Count https://t.co/W0ovX7ImeX10:38 PM · Sep 10, 2026 · 35K Views48 Replies · 475 Reposts · 3.05K Likes
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