Apparently autumn is when President Donald Trump feels free to admit to his anti-free speech, anti-free press ways. For a guy who constantly lied about being in support of free speech, despite regularly suing people and news organizations for their speech, he’s been remarkably willing to admit to wanting to abuse power to suppress speech lately. A year ago, he admitted that he “took the freedom of speech away” when he tried to remove the First Amendment protections (something he cannot actually do) regarding flag burning. And last week, when asked about it in the oval office, he admitted that he was “banning the free press”:

Specifically, he’s banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. (MS NOW, for anyone who missed the rebrand, is the network formerly known as MSNBC.) If you didn’t see it, he (naturally) announced the ban with no due process on his personal propaganda and grift site, Truth Social:

That’s him posting:

I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Yes, you’re very proud to announce yet another attack on free speech and the free press. Also, the whole “$8 million dollar subscription” thing is a bullshit misreading of subscriptions taken out by many different individuals and agencies across the federal government to Politico’s subscription offering.

Of course, all this is unconstitutional. We know this because we’ve been through this before. In his first term he banned a couple of reporters from the White House for asking questions he didn’t like, and he lost in court.

In this case, the White House has already denied access to reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico:

Reporters for CNN, MS NOW and Politico said they were denied access to the White House grounds Saturday, a day after President Donald Trump said the three news organizations were banned from the location.

The fact that this is such an extreme and obvious attack on speech doesn’t much matter to Trump or his MAGA supporters, who are already making up all sorts of excuses about how this is perfectly normal and fine.

They’re lying.

And we know they’re lying. We know it from Trump’s own first term, and we know it from Obama’s first term, when many of these same people lost their minds over something far less egregious: avoiding having administration officials appear on Fox News, claiming the network was “a wing of the Republican Party.” After widespread complaints about this, including from other White House reporters, the White House backed down and made officials available to Fox News again.

Years later, Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch FOIA’d the White House emails about all this and spun them into another round of stories about Obama officials making jokes at Fox News’ expense.

“The Obama administration seems to have lied about its attempt to exclude Fox News Channel from access to an interview with the ‘pay czar,'” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

Fitton told Fox News the White House treatment was “something Hugo Chavez might do but it really has no place in modern-day America.”

Rather than condemning Trump’s action, Fitton went on X and posted a link about the Obama story, leaving out every detail that makes the two situations different. So, to be clear: Trump has fully banned three top news orgs from the White House. In 2009, the Obama administration thought about excluding Fox News from a pool of reporters to interview a mid-level administration official, and then backed down almost immediately when the rest of the media industry complained. To Tom Fitton, these are apparently the same thing:

As always, with MAGA folks, the hypocrisy is the policy. Trump and his supporters love showing off about how they get away with breaking the rules that they would never allow a Democrat to break. To them it’s a form of “owning the libs.”

Also, what a weird group of news orgs to exclude. CNN has spent years bending over backwards to try to sanewash nearly everything that Trump has done. They regularly platform liars like Scott Jennings to spew Trump’s false talking points. Meanwhile, Politico is owned by Axel Springer, whose CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has spent years platforming far-right political figures from Viktor Orban to Elon Musk, and has repeatedly supported Donald Trump. He even wrote an ass-kissing piece in Politico (now banned from the White House) as a kind of open letter to the EU, that they should give Trump what he wants: “Trump wants a strong Europe — and Europe should listen.”

And his reward: having his journalists banned from the White House.

Why, it’s almost as if sucking up to the petty, thin-skinned authoritarian in the White House is no guarantee that he won’t turn around and punish you for saying something he dislikes.

Unsurprisingly, CNN, Politico, and MSNOW sued earlier this morning.

This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles. Presidents from the earliest days of the Republic have disagreed with and complained about the tenor and content of press coverage of their administrations. But as the Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment, including its guarantee of a free press, reflects “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). And the Constitution protects the liberty and property interests that news organizations and White House reporters have in their press credentials and the access those credentials afford them to cover the White House for the benefit of the public. No official can deprive Plaintiffs of those interests on a whim—with no notice, no process, and no warning—as the President did here.

As Trump’s health and political power begin to wane, we’re starting to see major media companies display what can only be described as the faint outline of a backbone. We’ve seen it with ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC for its bogus censorship efforts. And we’re also seeing it here, as numerous major media outlets say they’re cutting off all coverage of presidential events due to the ban:

Perhaps realizing that his own statements on “banning the free press” are likely to look bad in court, Trump went back to Truth Social this morning as well to insist that when he said he was “banning the free press” he didn’t actually mean a ban on the free press:

That’s him saying:

The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Which… is not how any of this works. The whole point of the First Amendment is that no government official, let alone the president, gets to decide what is good reporting and what is “fake news.” Because the second a government officials gets to make that determination is the second the First Amendment is nothing but a dead letter.

As Trump gets more afraid of his own embarrassing political and existential collapse, he’ll only lash out further. But the threats will increasingly carry less weight; particularly if the midterms deliver a lame duck president. And again, while intended to portray strength, they’ll only demonstrate growing fear and weakness by a dim authoritarian narcissist clearly approaching the end of the line.

At this point no one serious still believes that Trump is “the free speech president,” but calling out each of his increasingly erratic censorial attacks on free speech is still important in reminding everyone that this is not normal, not constitutional, and absolutely not in support of free speech.

The Ultimate AWS Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to get you up to speed on Amazon Web Services. The courses cover AWS, DevOPs, Kubernetes Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS Redshift, and more. It’s on sale for $40.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

When we picture the end of the world, the first thing that springs to mind is typically the cinematic version of “things going wrong.” We picture the musical score rising to a crescendo as the climactic events take place.  Our heroes are fighting to stop some big giant, unstoppable threat. Even if they are ultimately doomed, there is something noble and exhilarating in going down fighting. And if our heroes somehow survive failure and make it to the post-apocalypse, they usually still have great hair, even though civilization has collapsed.

Put another way, in the movies, the apocalypse is usually pretty sexy. 

Of course, in reality disaster is often much more mundane – something closer to dumb and sad than to sexy — as Randall Munroe pointed out years ago in a slightly different context:

A lot of attention is being paid at the moment to an entire culture that has grown up around the “AI Safety” world that is intently focused on stories of doom and the threatened end of humanity. That’s big, attention getting, and splashy. The tabloid version of this culture — the group houses, the polyamory, the recruitment dynamics that a lot of people are suddenly discovering — is even splashier still.

Taken as a whole, this specific version of AI safety is getting a lot of oxygen right now. It’s easy to see why — as a kind of “sexy apocalypse” these narratives, while frightening, are an exciting fantasy, even if they would be an awful reality.  But that heightened fantasy is not what AI safety is actually about.

It’s not about protecting us from the unlikely sexy apocalypse.  It’s about protecting us from the far more likely, and far more numerous, stupid apocalypses along the way.

This mismatch between cinematic safety and actual safety happens all the time. During the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller got some attention by worrying that the Trinity Test might set the entirety of Earth’s atmosphere on fire. Very cinematic! Very concerning! But, as with most things, the reality was much more mundane. Actual experts looked at Teller’s concern, ran the boring calculations, and ruled it out as a threat long before the actual test. That is how safety often works: boring, process-heavy work… that kills off the really sexy scenario.

Instead of global immolation, the real risks came from otherwise smart people doing dumb shit, such as the infamous Demon Core incident, where physicist Louis Slotin exposed himself, and a number of others, to a lethal dose of radiation by trying to use a simple screwdriver head to separate a plutonium core from a reflector… and slipping. Incredibly, this was the second time a mistake like this had happened, with the exact same plutonium core, and Enrico Fermi himself had warned Slotin he’d be dead within a year if he kept it up. Turns out he was right.

For all the talk of “AI Safety” risk these days, the most present real risks remain variations on the theme of “humans doing stupid shit”. Sometimes really smart humans. But stupid actions by humans are a lot less headline grabbing than the shiny sexy apocalypse. A human accidentally causing a radioactive chain reaction by carelessly using a screwdriver to separate things is stupid. Skynet turning everyone into paperclips… is kind of cool and fun.

But, as anyone who works in risk mitigation (including one of the authors of this piece) can tell you, the overwhelming majority of actual disasters aren’t cool and fun. Instead, they’re usually more like the Demon Core: stupid, disappointing, and easily prevented if only a few common sense steps had been taken.

As evidence, one need only to look at the world right now. Most people — perhaps outside of Mike Judge — would not have predicted that the world economy would be on the brink of collapse because the US is run by a group of chud idiots, who think trade is a scam, strategy is woke, and diplomacy is for girls. The current troubles the world is facing are not due to out of control science. They’re due to the American electorate putting aggressively ignorant people into office again.

The most recent flare-up of doom talk traces back to the highly publicized hacking of Hugging Face by an OpenAI model that was being evaluated. As has now been dissected repeatedly, the case involved a model being tested with deliberately lowered guardrails against the ExploitGym benchmark. Told to score as well as possible and not to stop until it had, the model landed on the laziest and most obvious strategy if one has no guardrails: cheat on the test. It then used an unknown exploit in OpenAI’s own sandbox to reach the open internet and quietly broke into Hugging Face looking for those answers.

There was, clearly, a step up in capabilities here. The tool was testing its ability to find exploits and it certainly found some unexpected ones in its pursuit of the ExploitGym benchmark answers. And it’s easy to see how capabilities of this kind could lead to innumerable stupid disasters, like flash crashing the internet through poorly fenced-in systems mindlessly hacking websites to complete some relatively trivial goal.  What happened with that matters in understanding AI safety, but the framing of it as evidence of malicious will on the part of an AI system has sent people off to chase fictional monsters.

The incident wasn’t Terminator-style “rogue AI” doing anything. All of the mistakes that led up to this were, as Eryk Salvaggio points out at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, fundamentally human mistakes. Employees at OpenAI deliberately disabled the guardrails, they gave the tool an effectively impossible task while telling it not to stop until it had accomplished the task, and they (accidentally!) left a door open for the tool to reach the internet and fan out. These are all human mistakes. Stupid, disappointing, easily preventable. Like using a screwdriver to prop open a plutonium core.

And if we know anything, we know that humans will keep making mistakes like this, and not just because we’re stupid. Slotin wasn’t stupid. The OpenAI researchers who turned off the guardrails weren’t stupid. They were smart people doing dumb things. These sorts of “banal disasters” are the failure mode that we can and should be focused on minimizing because, while they can be just as damaging as the grand and cinematic versions, they are (self-evidently) far more likely to happen, because they only require stupid decisions to accomplish. No brilliant breakthroughs or novel technologies are required — just people doing stupid things because they’re overconfident in their own abilities — or overconfident because the talking machine confidently told them to be.

Unfortunately, doing the real safety work in the tech world to prevent these kinds of human disasters is often some combination of boring, depressing, and unpopular. Yes, you have to think like adversaries and consider what actions they might take, but those adversaries tend not to be god-like beings looking to turn us into paperclips. They tend to be things like teenagers trying to get around the restrictions their parents have put on their devices. Or people trying to spam systems for commercial intent.

This essential nuts-and-bolts safety work also doesn’t, typically, require brilliant and manly heroes to nobly die for the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods.  Instead, the hard work of actual safety requires things that are much less sexy: empathy, conflicting values, and a deep understanding of tradeoffs that will never fully resolve. Those qualities are not highly esteemed in the present moment. But they are critical for tackling the actual threats and the actual risks, which aren’t as flashy, and don’t make for such fun headlines. AI safety matters, but we’re unlikely to move in the direction of actual safety if all the focus is on fantastical stories involving killer robots.

But that’s not what the media wants to talk about these days — and, tragically, it also doesn’t seem to be what the CEOs of the frontier labs are all that interested in these days either. There are real AI safety issues we should be taking seriously, and none of them have to do with whether some frontier model decides it wants to play a game of thermonuclear war.

Dave Willner is the co-founder of Zentropi, formerly the head of trust & safety at OpenAI, of community policy at Airbnb, and of content policy at Facebook.

Mike Masnick is the founder, editor, and CEO of Techdirt and has been staring into the abyss of internet safety questions for far too long.

I’ve written a lot about how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos convinced Republicans to redirect billions in taxpayer money away from future-proof fiber optic upgrades, and toward their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband networks they’d already planned to deploy. Curious behavior for two extremely-rich gentlemen who both repeatedly claim to loathe subsidies and corporate welfare.

The short version: the billionaires convinced Republicans to retool the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program (created by the 2021 infrastructure bill) in a way that weakened oversight standards, eliminated enforcement of stuff like broadband affordability, speed, and equitable deployment, and shoveled taxpayers toward more expensive, slower, less reliable satellite service.

After doing billionaires a giant favor, Republicans proudly claimed they’d “saved taxpayers around $21 billion” in “non-deployment funds.” The problem: Congress specifically earmarked this money for broadband deployment, so states were understandably annoyed at the missed opportunity.

For much of the last year, states and scattered lawmakers have been begging the Trump NTIA to offer guidance on what is going to happen to this $21 billion. Initially I think they hoped they could just pocket or repurpose that money. When they realized they couldn’t get away with it, they announced last week they’d vaguely be opening additional BEAD funding rounds to try and put the money to work.

Former FCC official Gigi Sohn, illustrated how stupid this all is over at a post at LinkedIn:

“After proudly cutting back on BEAD-eligible locations in its “Benefit of the Bargain” and “Best and Final” bidding rounds, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has now decided that part of the money it allegedly “saved” will go back to deploy broadband in the places that it nixed previously.”

But there’s still no meaningful guidance on what any of this means (which is required by law). And the BEAD standards have been so altered and twisted, there’s nothing saying this doesn’t just result in billions more money being funneled to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for substandard LEO satellite service that’s expensive and increasingly congested (because it wasn’t designed to be a mainstream option).

The bipartisan infrastructure law that created BEAD says that any extra BEAD money left over after physically connecting people must be used to improve broadband maps (which telecoms hate because it highlights market failure), install low-cost connectivity in multiple dwelling units like low income apartment complexes, or support broadband adoption programs. All of which the Trump administration claim are “woke.”

Sohn notes that under the law the Trump NTIA needs to provide clear guidance for the funds. Just ambiguously stating that money can still be maybe used for broadband doesn’t cut it:

“NTIA Administrator Roth promised a Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that she would issue non-deployment guidance this summer. This partial guidance should not serve as a promise kept. The last day of summer is September 22. Tick Tock.”

The annoyance at the Trump NTIA is increasingly bipartisan, as politicians in states like Texas realize this whole program was mired with all sorts of billionaire favoritism, delays, and weird new bureaucratic obstacles that significantly eroded what could have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand affordable, fast broadband.

I think this hasn’t been a bigger scandal (yet) in part because states don’t want to speak out and risk not getting billions in funds. So a lot of folks I see in telecom policy are privately furious or disgusted, but publicly pretending that any of this still makes any coherent sense.

It’s important to remember that Republicans spent all last election season complaining that this BEAD program was a bureaucratic hellscape they were going to immediately fix once in office.

Instead the Trump admin redirected billions to billionaires, eliminated any provisions requiring the broadband be equitably deployed and affordable, hijacked $21. billion for what they clearly hoped would be their own personal use, and created years of additional delays due to corruption and bureaucracy.

Folks like Ezra Klein, who helped Republicans parrot BEAD concerns in 2024, have been nowhere to be found since. In fact none of the “abundance” folks have made a single solitary peep about how badly the opportunity to build much-needed affordable broadband infrastructure has been bungled by Trump Incorporated.

This week on the insightful side, both top comments come in response to our post about the New York Times bending over backwards to downplay Trump’s criminality and absurdity. In first place it’s Thad thinking about the week in which it happened:

What better way for the New York Times to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 than to act as a propaganda arm for a fascist president?

In second place, it’s Whoever with a broader comment about journalism:

The most corrosive idea in American journalism is the “both sides” idea. It rejects the idea that there is an objective truth and that everything is an opinion. It rejects reporting facts in favor of reporting feelings or reporting the agenda of partisan people.

Sometimes, one cannot get to an objective truth, but many times, one can and should report this.

Yet, we do have several “news” sources that reject the idea of reporting “both sides”: but they don’t replace it with truth. For example Newsmax or Fox news.

But for editor’s choice on the insightful side we’ll start out with a sort of “both sides” comment that does work, from Thad again and on our post about Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon complaining about AI:

On the one hand, headlines like Gizmodo’s and this one that imply Sanders appeared directly with Steve Bannon are misleading, given that what actually happened was they were separate speakers at the same conference.

On the other hand, if you ever accept an invitation to speak at a conference, and then learn that other invited speakers include Steve Bannon, the only correct thing to do in that situation is cancel. Sanders shouldn’t have been there, regardless of whether or not he and Bannon were ever in the same room.

Next, it’s Drew Wilson back on the post about news outlets playing nice with Trump:

The kicker is that the media outlets will still get punished anyway for some reason or another (thanks to Trumps extremely thin skin). I mean, the media spent years sucking up to Trump and the Trump White House, in response, built a webpage devoted to calling the bootlicking media a bunch of liars. Won’t be the last time the Trump admin does something like that, either.

And we’ll remain on that post for a while since it’s also the source of both winning comments on the funny side. Not just that, Thad took first place here too, with a comment replying to a line of riffing that you might be able to figure out or might have to go look at:

I suppose that plan to build a bunker has some potential upsides.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment taking a look at the legal issues with Trump’s announcement:

“Attempted murder”? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?

But if he can’t actually give the money, how is he guilty of bribery?

Checkmate libs.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from MrWilson about the fact that the problems with the reflecting pool was from a botched repair job, despite the accusations:

Ironically, there are several videos of the “vandalism.” It was the footage of the work the contractors were doing!

Finally, we’ll close it out with one last comment from Thad, this time in response to the assertion that Trump’s damage to public institutions “could end up lasting a generation”:

I never figured you for an optimist.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week in 2016

• Colin Powell’s Email To Clinton About Personal Devices Shows Routing Around FOIA Is Business As Usual
• ACLU Launching Campaign To Have President Obama Pardon Snowden
• More Details On How Corporate Sovereignty Provisions, Like Those In TPP & TTIP, Are Dangerous
• Prenda’s Paul Hansmeier Loses His Law License; Won’t Be Filing Bogus ADA Lawsuits For Now
• EU Announces Absolutely Ridiculous Copyright Proposal That Will Chill Innovation, Harm Creativity
• Over 200 Economics & Law Professors Urge Congress To Reject Corporate Sovereignty Provisions In Trade Deals

This Week in 2011

• MPAA: Bad At Math & Bad At Economics
• Accused Of Copyright Infringement For Reprinting Images Produced In 630 A.D.
• Hollywood Accounting: Darth Vader Not Getting Paid, Because Return Of The Jedi Still Isn’t Profitable
• Hotfile Responds To Lawsuit Filed By Studios, Countersues Warner Bros. For Copyright Misuse
• UK Politician Pushing For Its Own Version Of PROTECT IP
• How Payola Works Today… Or Why You Only Hear Major Label Songs On The Radio

This Week in 2006

• In A Politically Sticky Situation? Blame A Hacker!
• How Do You Hate Your Mobile Phone Company? Let Me Count The Ways…
• Why Introduce New Intellectual Property Rights In A Highly Competitive Market?
• Entertainment Industry Outsources Brainwashing School Kids To The Feds
• Schwarzenegger Hacking Claims Crumbling Like A Bunch Of Girlie Men
• Universal Music Publicly Threatens To Sue YouTube, MySpace

Well, as we previously discussed was going to occur, RFK Jr. gave his keynote speech and appearance at the Children’s Health Defense conference of anti-vaxxer conspiracy-mongers, and he was certainly firmly on brand. In fact, he did so much to make news during and around this appearance that we’re going to have to break this post up into several sections to only briefly talk about the insanity that came vomiting out of his mouth.

The Anti-Vaxxer Of It All:

Ah, RFK Jr. classic. Among the many lies Kennedy appears to have told during his confirmation hearings, the biggest of them all was when he told Congress he wasn’t an anti-vaxxer and wouldn’t do anything to change how vaccines are administered in America. Almost immediately after his confirmation, Kennedy remade the CDC’s ACIP in his image, attempted to change the vaccination schedules for children, changed federal recommendations for other vaccines in adults, and pushed Trump into issuing an executive order demanding we all pretend that we’re Danish.

Through it all, Kennedy has insisted he’s not an anti-vaxxer. Instead, he’ll say things like “the MMR vaccine is the best way to protect yourself from measles” and then go on to claim that that same vaccine is dangerous, untested, and has injured many Americans.

But he is an anti-vaxxer and you need only to listen to his address to anti-vaxxer group Children’s Health Defense to understand that.

“Let me be clear: You have a strong and steadfast friend in the White House. We’ve accomplished in 19 months things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago,” he said.

The speech, peppered with questions about long established vaccine safety, also highlighted how once fringe views on vaccines have been given a prominent pulpit under the Trump administration. Kennedy boasted about the administration’s moves to downsize the childhood vaccination schedule and reshape a key vaccine advisory board — steps that have since been halted by a judge.

Kennedy lauded Trump for pushing ahead with attempts to overhaul vaccine guidance, including an executive order last month calling for spacing out the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, against medical groups’ recommendations.

Again, these are all things that Kennedy promised he would not do in his confirmation hearings. He lied, Congress knows he lied, and he should be impeached for it. And I’ll also say that to state the above in the middle of the largest outbreak of measles in America in over 30 years is wild. Speaking of which…

I’ll See Your Real Deaths And Raise You Fake Vaccine Injuries

Does RFK Jr. care about the 6 dead Americans who have succumbed to the measles under his watch? Sure, according to him. But why aren’t you talking about all the Americans who have been hurt by vaccines?

Let’s just start off with the obvious: Kennedy doesn’t give a single shit about the people he helped die from measles, particularly in Pennsylvania. Kennedy, like any good sociopath, cares about Kennedy. Regarding the now four measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania, Kennedy reportedly stepped in to keep the CDC from even publicly acknowledging those deaths have occurred. His primary public comments on those deaths have teetered between claiming those deaths may not even have happened and failing to mention them at all while trying to slap around Governor Shapiro online.

Show me real, scientifically validated vaccine injuries and I’ll have an opinion on what should be done about them. It’s not that they don’t exist; rather, it’s that they are tiny in number and are far outweighed by the enormous health benefits of vaccines to the public.

The real point here is that Kennedy’s attempt to pivot to vaccine injuries rather than address actual dead people from measles is a non-sequitur.

Another HHS Panel Of Charlatans

Here we go again. ACIP isn’t the only important health panel that Kennedy decided to remake in his conspiratorial image. Back in May we talked about how Kennedy had fired the leadership of the U.S. Preventative Task Force and largely sidelined their work. The USPSTF is a volunteer group, traditionally made of appointed medical generalists who recommend which preventative care procedures should be covered by insurance companies and which should not.

Kennedy has broken with that tradition by instead installing medical specialists and sycophants of his to the group.

Those fears seemed to be realized today with the announcement of members who are largely out of line with previous appointments. Many of the new members have expressed a shared ideology with Kennedy and the Trump administration. At least one voiced criticism of COVID-19 vaccines. At least two have attacked gender-affirming care. One is not even a doctor but a health economist who has worked with the Trump administration.

Five of the eight members are specialists, including cardiologists, a gastroenterologist, and a radiologist; the USPSTF has previously been made up of people who provide preventive care—generalist and primary care providers. This prevents specialists from swaying recommendations based on conflicts of interest. Notably, the USPSTF’s policy on conflict of interest disclosures has been removed, and the webpage that previously included it said the policy is now being updated.

In a statement Thursday, Willie Underwood, president of the American Medical Association, called Kennedy’s new slate of members “a significant departure from the Task Force’s traditional membership.”

The qualifications for these new members are very clear. They’re donators to the Trump campaign, doctors who are firmly against gender-affirming care, educators who have been critical of COVID vaccines, former Trump White House advisors, and so on. Every single one of these appointments is political in nature, in other words, rather than being focused in any way on actual health outcomes or good science.

The impact of whatever fuckery this panel gets up to will be of a financial nature due to insurance coverage, health outcomes due to availability of care, or both. It also means that any reporting coming out of the panel is immediately suspect, since Kennedy is a well-known meddler and puppeteer in the child agencies that work under his umbrella.

So long science and facts. Hello conspiracy theories and culture war. Good times.

Make Sure You Buy Your N95 Grade Tinfoil Helmet

Speaking at the CHD event, you can really get a sense of just how much solid-footing that group has around vaccine science by examining what else the group is interested in. And for that, we can look at what else Kennedy spoke about outside of vaccine policy.

Ah, yes, EMF and chemtrails. Now we know we’re dealing with very serious people.

EMF conspiracy theories have largely centered on claims that the radiation levels and frequencies of WiFi signals and phone data signals are harmful to those exposed to them. That would be — checks notes — pretty much fucking everyone at this point. The scientific consensus on this sort of thing is quite clear: there is no evidence to suggest that exposure to wireless and 5G signals have any measurable health impact on people and, in fact, those signals don’t contain enough energy to have such an impact.

Kennedy wants to study it more. And if he could be trusted to be an honest broker in any of this, I’d only have a mild problem with a waste of taxpayer funds like this. But Kennedy has proven to be a serial liar who is all too happy to put his thumb on the scales of science to get the outcome he wants. He may as well be spending tax money to study the existence of the Easter Bunny.

As for chemtrails, this has been another long-time passion of Kennedy’s, which should inform you just how far back his departure from reality goes. Chemtrails just simply aren’t a thing. Contrails are, which is when exhaust from plane engines collides with the freezing temperatures at high-altitude and then condenses into ice and eventually clouds of moisture. But the chemtrail claim is that something is being released from commercial planes of a chemical nature that is intentionally dumped onto unsuspecting Americans to do… something.

What that something is can vary from conspiracy theorist to conspiracy theorist, because none of this is actual science. If you’d like to know why Kennedy is particularly interested in chemtrails, well, the potential chemicals being released per these theories are chemicals for weather manipulation (meh), sterilizing agents for population control (unlikely to be that interesting to Kennedy), chemicals that allow for government mind-control (doubtful on this one, what’s next?), and spreading either illnesses, secret vaccines, or both (ding ding ding!)

There’s no reason to believe any of this is occurring. There’s no reason to spend taxpayer money to study it further. But it is a very useful barometer for just how serious the people at CHD are about science, medicine, and basic reality. The answer is they are deeply unserious.

As is Kennedy. Each of the four sections above could have been its own post, as there are more details to get into for each of them. But I think it’s also useful to see them all mashed together so you can get an idea of just how much bullshit and chaos this one man is being allowed to spread over the course of a single day.

As I’ve promised to put on repeat: Get him out of office by any and all peaceful and legal means.