The Unedited Transcript

Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday night. My days are all mixed up because I work from home and now my kids are home with me every day. All day long. We’re adjusting.

Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone is having a lovely now summer vacation. I did an interview with Amy Hogarth today, and they are all just dying in Europe of heat. B…

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by Brett Di Resta (with contributions by Cliff Schecter)

The event-horizon-like implosion of Graham Platner in Maine calls into question everything I thought I knew about Democratic strategists and research.

As many must know by now, Daniel Moraff of the political consulting firm The Fight Agency “discovered” Graham Platner and immediately fell in love. And not just a quotidian kind of love. The love of fairy tales and Trump family pre-nups. Moraff had Platner pegged as our next President before he even had the nomination to run as the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine.

Which perhaps blinded him to the obvious.

Rather than taking their time and do it right, the consultants paid a research firm $6,250 and gave them just three days to vet Platner’s background. Additionally, Moraff (who has his own, personal vetting issues) copped in an interview to immediately tossing aside all of the research findings he had rushed to receive for pennies on the dollar.

Trust me when I tell you that the initial vet of someone planning to run for the U.S. Senate should take several weeks, and cost at least twice as much as what Moraff paid. Watching him brag about his incompetent vetting strategy is like seeing someone buy gas station sushi—then boast about getting it on the cheap while ambling toward an outhouse.

There is an old adage that Washington, D.C. is just Hollywood for ugly people. Comedian Jay Leno, former host of The Tonight Show, was fond of repeating that one to the oft-uproarious laughter of his late-show audience.

And if it’s true for Democratic consultants—political researchers are most certainly dead last on the call sheet. But when they need us, they need us. That’s why after 30 years as an opposition researcher, I’m at peace with our place in the campaign firmament. I take comfort in the fact that the true political ball-knowers—the professionals who take their jobs seriously and want to win their campaigns—greatly value what we do.

Or at least, they used to. Moraff—obviously—but also too many among his ilk seem to neither understand nor value the contribution and/or necessity of quality opposition research.

In fact, it is where too many campaigns—Democratic ones we care about—truly get it wrong these days.

The problem was not simply that vulnerabilities existed—it was that no one seemed to understand what professional vetting was actually supposed to accomplish. So let me tell you exactly where these campaigns failed, why they keep making the same mistakes over-and-over again, and how competent campaigns handle these situations before they become front-page news.

What should they have done? Let’s start with Platner and go through the list. Yes, sadly, there’s a list of Democratic debacles this campaign cycle that are threatening the kind of wave election we should have—by every metric available.

Ok, let’s get started.

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There is a version of the presidency that shows up at a dignified transfer to grieve with the families, and it isn’t Donald Trump. On his way to receive Americans killed in the Iran war, Trump claimed the fallen had personally told him—“very strongly”—that Iran must never get a nuclear weapon. Dead men, drafted as endorsers of the war that killed them, out of the mouth of a lunatic.

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A day earlier, he had posted a body-count comparison on Truth Social framing eighteen American deaths as a bargain, and at the ceremony itself the military muted the microphones so the country could not hear the families.

In this report, rolls the tape on all of it—then takes you inside the Senate hearing where Jon Ossoff asked Pete Hegseth one simple yes-or-no question about his “combat ineffective” claims, again and again, and got zero answers, even as the Pentagon requests $67 billion more to keep the war going.

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It’s been a crazy summer, but at least we had the World Cup! Oh, and also a fresh crop of AI satire to get us through it. This week, counts down five clips that cover the waterfront: Spain’s big win gets an ending nobody at FIFA saw coming, a Lego AI walks through the poll numbers that have the White House sweating, and Steve Scalise—who insists you can’t get pasta at Olive Garden without a photo ID—finds out what that policy feels like in practice.

Then Mr. Neuberger delivers a doo-wop tribute to Todd Blanche, the man tasked with making the Epstein files disappear, and four very familiar voices close the show with a barbershop number you’ll be humming into November. Six minutes, five clips, and one assignment: check your voter registration, because many states cut it off 30 days before the midterms.

Watch to the end.

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Hen Mazzig, writer and scholar, joined me for what was a fascinating conversation about the roles being played by Russia, China, Qatar, and Iran in running influence operations throughout the United States.

These include everything from hacks to online operations to boost the most MAGA faction of the GOP and divide the Left by pushing anti-Semitic, racist, and misogynistic narratives to convince parts of the coalition to not turn out out on election day.

But they also include offline operations using pop-up organizations to create fake events. Public infighting among those of us fighting Trump’s fascism is the goal—like Richard Nixon in his COINTELPRO days. Trump’s GOP is of couse amplifying all of it—I’m surprised they’re not handing out Hillary’s emails with an Elon Musk payment not to vote—while attacking the ability of as many of us as possible to vote against him this year. Because he knows his numbers suck in a truly historic way.

And Trump knows that not having anything resembling an honest election is the only way the lifelong loser can win. So we’re telling you how to stop him.

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Trump’s stupid tariffs, emotionally perforated poodle-barking threats, and endless attempts to turn our closest ally into a punching bag have finally pushed Canadian leaders from a position of polite disapproval into more of a “suck-it, poutine-hater” stance. Dean laid it all out for us, and as much as it’s bad for America, it was hard for all of us not to break out laughing at Trump (and so we did).

Provinces are yanking U.S booze from their shelves. Officials are considering retaliatory tariffs and boycotts involving energy, potash, and critical minerals. Even conservative members of provincial governments are openly mocking this imbecilic empty-egg-carton of a man. Canadians are famously kind people—but, as Dean reminded us, “nice” doesn’t mean *willing to be kicked in the privates by a demented Florida grifter tweeting from his golden sh*tter at 2am.*

Trump assumes every country will surrender if he creates enough chaos. You’d think that no country has done so would be a hint by now. They know—as any sentient human does—there’s no agreement to be reached with the convicted felon. He breaks treaties, invents deals that exist in the same way “they’re eating the dogs, eating the cats,” and will change course after flattery from a dictator. If a billionaire waves money and he catches a clear scent, he’d kick Barron over to get to it, deal be damned.

Canada increasingly gets what far too many American institutions can’t digest: Trump can’t negotiate in good faith because piles of human excrement tend not to be infused with it. He wants drama, submission, personal profit. Dean laughingly pointed out Canada’s lighting Trump’s playbook on fire because they get that its willingness to impose real economic consequences may be the only language Trump understands.

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This week on the Epstein Update, , , and dig into the stories hiding in plain sight in the Epstein files. Kait walks through her developing investigation of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—an email in Ehud Barak’s leaked archive naming Bessent as a client of Barak’s private intelligence firm Ergo, a confidential report warning that Russia planned to move off the dollar, and Bessent’s departure from the Soros Fund a year later to launch his own—and asks what that history means for a Treasury Secretary now shaping stablecoin policy and refusing to release the files.

Ellie lays out her year-by-year count showing the files effectively vanish before 2009, then opens her Interlochen investigation: the summer camp Epstein attended once and then showered with money, the 13-year-olds documented flying from camp to his house, the Wexner-funded “Epstein Lodge,” and the FBI 302s that tie it together.

The trio also covers the Dershowitz email that scripted Virginia Giuffre’s retraction word for word, the Catch and Kill chapter contradicting Michael Cohen’s Katie Johnson story, Jamie Raskin’s FARA push, day 37 of the missing Mitch McConnell, and Cliff’s new piece calling on Governor Beshear to fill the seat.

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by David Shuster

There is no office in Texas government more remarkable than the one Dan Patrick appears to have created for himself: Lieutenant Governor, President of the Senate, and Acting Registrar of the Kingdom of Heaven.

At the recent Texas Republican convention, Patrick informed the faithful that democratic Senate candidate James Talarico is guilty of blasphemy and is bound for hell. One imagines St. Peter learning of this arrangement and being more than a bit surprised. For two millennia the Church has debated salvation with great care; Patrick settled the matter in between GOP applause lines.

It was an astonishing performance for a man who professes devotion to a book that contains a rather memorable warning from its central figure: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Jesus did not add the customary modern political exception: “...unless the other fellow is running as a Democrat and doesn’t wear a black jacket and mock turtleneck.”

That omission seems to have escaped the Lieutenant Governor. Common sense also escaped Patrick. He accused James Talarico of being “Low-T” as in low testosterone. Never mind that testosterone is not a problem for young men, though it’s a huge problem for elderly men like Patrick, whose sartorial choices and receding gray hair only seemed to underscore the GOP elder’s projection.

James Talarico presents a vexing problem for the Texas Republican establishment.

He is not a secular progressive dismissing Christianity from public discourse. He teaches Sunday school. He reads Scripture closely. He quotes the Gospels with enough familiarity to make people who merely wave them around extremely uncomfortable. He has the habit of asking what Jesus actually said about the poor, the stranger, mercy, forgiveness, humility, and the corrupting influence of wealth and power.

That is not blasphemy.

It is simply awkward for politicians whose preferred Bible passages never interfere with tax policy or campaign talking points.

Modern Texas Republicans have perfected an extraordinary theological innovation. Christianity is now only measured by partisan affiliation. The Beatitudes have become optional; party orthodoxy is mandatory. The Sermon on the Mount is treated not as divine instruction but rather as a draft that should have gone through a round of GOP editing.

But it gets even wilder. Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton has added to the hypocrisy by declaring that James Talarico lacks “Texas values.”

This is rich.

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by Cliff Schecter

Mitch McConnell has been missing for thirty-six days.

Not missing in the manner his conscience has been on hiatus since roughly 1984—we stopped canvassing the neighborhood looking for that a long arse time ago. No, McConnell inside that turtle shell of a body that should contain an essence, is literally missing.

The senior senator from Kentucky—the lout who turned minority rule into performance art, who stole one Supreme Court seat from President Obama and jammed another through after millions of ballots had already been cast the next presidential election. Who stood on the Senate floor and told us Donald Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for January 6th—and then voted to acquit him, because Mitch’s outrage has always been decorative, like his marriage.

McConnell fell at his Washington home on June 14. Knocked his noggin. Was briefly unconscious. Got pneumonia after that. Allegedly.

And then? Nothing. For nearly a month, the longest-serving Senate party leader in American history and first corporation to prance around in a human suit just…wasn’t.

No video. No press avail. No colleague to say they’d had a real call. Though CNN’s resident pissant, Scott Jennings, kept assuring anyone with a camera that Mitch was just dandy. But you know the drill by now. If Scott’s lips are moving, he’s lying.

Then, on July 12—the same day Graham was buried in this very newsletter—McConnell’s office finally puked up a proof-of-life photo: a written statement, and newspaper in hand like he was a hostage in a Russell Crowe flick. McConnell (assuming he has a pulse) supposedly intends to finish his term, which ends in January. Mitch (or the ventriloquist dummy playing the role) claims men of his generation are hesitant to discuss vulnerability. (Men of his generation also used to look back on a long career infused with job stability, affordable healthcare and benefits if they fell unceremoniously in their house—Mitch destroyed that).

Meanwhile—and this is crucial to our plot—Lindsey Graham died, and South Carolina almost had a replacement Republican seated by sundown. Henry McMaster appointed a warm body (in this case, Lindsey’s sister). The warm body flies to Washington. There’s a special primary already on the calendar for August 11th. Done.

That’s how it works almost everywhere in America.

That’s how it’s supposed to work in America.

That’s how it doesn’t work in Kentucky, because of Mitch fucking McConnell. Democracy’s pestilence.

If McConnell’s seat comes open, Kentucky gets nothing. An empty chair. For months. On purpose. We’ll get to why.

Which brings us to the man with the biggest megaphone in the Commonwealth: Governor Andy Beshear. Two-time statewide winner in a state Trump carried by 30%. The party’s proof that decency still polls. And a man who’s running for president whether he’s said so yet or not.

On July 8, Beshear sent McConnell a letter.

A Letter Is Not a Plan

It was a good letter! Firm, respectful, right: Kentuckians deserve to know whether they have a functioning Senator who can do the job. When the proof-of-life photo surfaced four days later, Beshear said it was “a step in the right direction.”

Governor. Andy. Buddy. A letter is not a plan. We’ve been through this with Congress. Every time Trump bites another chunk outta the Constitution like it’s the hamberders he ordered for winning sports teams that decline to show up at the White House. Then a Schumerian letter arrives via courier.

Nothing. Happens.

“A step in the right direction” is what you say when there is no direction.

Now, a few things before the well-actually caucus shoots angry emails my way: I very much like Andy Beshear. He’s been at the top of my list for potential 2028 candidates, a man with conviction and political talent, who won reelection by 5% in a state more MAGA than The Epstein Files. Though I add one caveat: I’m old enough to know what I don’t know. Which is who’ll comprise the three or four—maybe half dozen—shiny new objects to score surprise victories—or win much bigger than expected—and come outta 2026 with a head full of steam.

But back to Gov. Beshear.

I know what Beshear can’t do, and so does he. He cannot declare McConnell incapacitated. Nobody can. There is no provision for it in federal law, Kentucky law, or the collective statutes of humankind to remove a senator who’s stopped functioning but won’t leave. Somehow the Magna Carta—or in this case, U.S. Constitution—didn’t think that one up in a country still beset by malaria with an average lifespan of 35-40 years in 1787.

That’s by design—the Senate is an institution built by and for men who intend to die at their desks. Carter Glass of Virginia was too sick to do his job for about four years in the 1940s, while chairing the Appropriations Committee. South Dakota’s Karl Mundt had a stroke in 1969, and held his seat until 1973.

Hell, I’m not sure we can technically still call Chuck Grassley a living creature, and he’s been in the U.S. Senate long enough to have voted against Martin Luther King Day. (No, I’m not kidding. About the MLK Day). Even more firightning? Because of another ridiculous flaw in our system—Grassley’s third in the line of succession to the presidency, which we award by tenure, not popularity or sentience.

But I digress.

The Senate’s response both times was “yeah, who cares.” As I was growing up working in politics, both Senators Strom Thurmond (R-SC) and Robert Byrd (D-WV) were regularly rolled onto the Senate floor for votes long past when they had any idea where they were or what they were doing.

So no—Beshear cannot conjure a vacancy, and any pundit screaming that he “just appoint someone” this afternoon is selling you outrage lacking a legal basis.

But here’s what those howling at the moon aren’t discussing, and should be: a list of things Beshear can do—now, this week, legally and loudly—is long.

And he hasn’t done any of them.

The Vacancy Machine They Built

First, understand the trap Kentucky Republican legislators built, because it is a masterpiece of cynicism. In 2024, the GOP supermajority in Frankfort passed House Bill 622, stripping the governor—specifically this Democratic governor; let’s not waste our time pretending otherwise—of his power to appoint an interim senator. Then passed it over Beshear’s veto, naturally. And nobody in Frankfort’s even shy about the rest: the moment a Republican re-occupies the governor’s mansion to a streaming performance of Ride of the Valkyries, watch that appointment power take out it’s GPS and find a way back to the governor like a cat that heard the can opener for the chunky tuna.

Under their bs law, a Senate vacancy can only be filled via special election, which needs roughly 63 days to prepare. Which produces an equation everyone in Frankfort can do, but nobody in Frankfort will say out loud: if McConnell’s seat comes open on or after August 3—two weeks from now—no special election can happen before the election in November. The seat would sit empty until January. Kentucky—4.5 million people, Fort Knox to Fort Campbell, flood counties still waiting on recovery money, some of my favorite bars in Covington—would have half a damn voice in the U.S. Senate through a government-shutdown fight.

They looked at that particular outcome and wrote it down. Then made it law. Kentucky Republicans decided they’d rather their Commonwealth have one senator than risk a demon-crat signing the paperwork for a second. That would be frightening!

A tribute to the wrong stuff that makes up the modern GOP.

When Lindsey died, I told you Republicans were playing Weekend at Bernie’s with this seat—propping up the calendar, not the man—because they’d rather take their chances on November’s ballot than face a special election in their worst political environment of my lifetime. That’s all still true. But there’s a plot point they haven’t thought through. We’re getting there.

And the punch line? Kentucky’s own constitution—Section 152—says the governor fills vacancies for statewide office. Whether a statute can override it hasn’t been tested in any courtroom, ever. But you can bet your arse Republicans would test it in a heartbeat.

Beshear has called HB 622 unconstitutional. He has threatened—there’s that word again—to challenge it.

So here is what doing it looks like. Five moves. One press conference. No sternly-worded letters in sight.

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by Lawrence Winnerman, Blue Amp Media COO
Once you’ve finished this, read the companion piece, The Layer War.

On Thursday, July 16^th, a company most Americans have never heard of released an artificial intelligence model that caught the American frontier lab models, and it released it from Beijing.

The company is called Moonshot AI. The model is Kimi K3: 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest model ever slated for open release, and within hours of its debut it stood in first place on Arena’s Frontend Code leaderboard, ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, the two most capable systems the American labs have ever shipped—first, in fact, in six of the seven coding categories. On Arena’s broader text rankings it finished ahead of Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic’s flagship until five weeks ago, while costing 40 percent less to run.

And on Monday, July 27^th, Moonshot says, it will give the whole thing away: the weights, the architecture, everything, free to download and free to run in any data center on earth. The weights are the model itself, the billions of numbers in which everything it learned is stored; whoever holds them holds the machine.

Moonshot—and, by extension, China, just beat us at AI and is giving the model away. For FREE.

Axios said it plainly Friday morning: “China just erased America’s AI lead.”

Eighty years to build, and all it took was one random Thursday to lose.

The computer is an American invention.

The theory owes a debt to a British mathematician, Turing, who his own government hounded to death, but the machines—the actual, humming, room-filling, world-changing machines—were built here in the United States.

In February 1946, in a room at the University of Pennsylvania, engineers threw the switches on ENIAC, thirty tons of vacuum tubes and hand-soldered wire that could do in thirty seconds what a human being with a desk calculator needed twenty hours to finish. The transistor came out of Bell Labs in New Jersey the following year; the integrated circuit out of Texas and California a decade after that; the microprocessor out of Santa Clara in 1971.

The supercomputer was substantially the work of one stubborn man in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin—Seymour Cray, who treated speed as a calling. The internet began as ARPANET, a Pentagon research project that spoke its first halting word between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in the autumn of 1969. And the transformer architecture that makes every modern AI model possible—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and yes, Kimi K3—was published in 2017 by eight researchers at Google, in a paper the company let out the door for free.

Every layer of this revolution was laid down on American ground, much of it with public money, much of it by people who came here from somewhere else because here was where you came to build. The record reads like myth and is footnoted like history. Computing is the American inheritance the way navigation belonged to Portugal and steel belonged to Sheffield, except bigger, because computing became the substrate everything else now runs on—including steel manufacturing and navigation.

I am not a neutral witness to any of this. I spent twenty-five years inside the American tech industry, managing programs at the largest scale it had to offer, and I believed—actually believed, the way you believe things at two in the morning in a war room when the release finally goes green—that we were building the future for everyone.

Then the industry decided that people my age were a cost center, the first wave of this technology arrived to absorb our work, and I got to experience the American way of implementing AI from the receiving end.

I know what these companies are from the inside, which is why you should believe me when I tell you: this was the home game, the one field we were supposed to lose last, or never at all.

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In 2023, the men running America’s AI industry told us China was eighteen months behind, and eighteen months, at frontier speed, was forever.

By last year the number was twelve months, maybe six. This April the federal government’s own AI testing center called it roughly eight months, and Stanford’s AI Index, reading the leaderboards this spring, found the gap between the top American and Chinese models had shrunk to 2.7 percent—no longer a lead so much as a rounding error with good publicists. Yesterday the number arrived at approximately zero, carrying a price tag 40 percent lower than ours and a shipping date for the free copy.

Eighteen, twelve, eight, two-point-seven, zero: a countdown every one of these executives could read the whole time, while they assured Congress and their investors and the rest of us that the moat was real.

We had mistaken being early for being ahead.

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Cliff sat down with his old friend Chris Lazar on Hardball this week, and about ninety seconds in, the gloves came off. What starts as a question about the party’s latest round of intramural bloodletting turns into the most unsparing twenty minutes Cliff has delivered on camera this year—names named, one Senate candidate’s résumé taken apart line by line, and a piece of reporting about who’s actually writing the checks that will make you want to throw something across the room.

But this isn’t just a takedown. Cliff reaches back to the 1890s, to a French guillotine, and to a Delaware witch to explain how we’ve seen this movie before—and who ends up headless when it finishes playing. If you want to know which fights are worth having, which candidates can actually win, and what one former history TA thinks the party must do before November, this one is worth every minute. Paid subscribers can watch the full appearance below.

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Shuster here—and what a week! The Iran war is back on, the news is heavy, and ’s antidote is the one that always works: the five sharpest pieces of AI political satire the internet coughed up this week, counted down from five to one. This edition has a rap battle, a beloved wizarding franchise recast with an all-too-familiar villain, a musical tribute no cabinet official asked for, and one senator’s hotly disputed proof of life. It is the week’s madness run through a comedy filter, and it is exactly what your blood pressure ordered.

We are not going to spoil the countdown—least of all the number-one slot, which Shuster only half-jokes he should reserve for this creator every single week. Five clips, four minutes, and not an ounce of mercy for the powerful. Hit play, laugh where you are supposed to, and see if you can call the order before he gets to the top. Then tell us in the comments which one you would have crowned.

Shuster out!

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and sit down with Emmy-winning journalist and Navy veteran Ken Harbaugh from , whose latest dispatch for The Atlantic pulls back the curtain on the best-kept secret of Ukraine’s resistance: women operating alone behind enemy lines, turning a Russian soldier’s flirtatious text into a map, and a map into a fireball. There is a Chechen commander who thought he was messaging a 35-year-old housewife. There is a target taken out mid-conversation. There is a bridge the Ukrainians left standing on purpose, a crown jewel called Crimea, and a long-range strike campaign now reaching places Moscow swore were untouchable. Harbaugh has been to the zero line to report it, and what he brought back is equal parts thriller and warning. We are not going to tell you how any of it ends.

Then the show takes a hard left turn. After the war room comes the confessional, and Cliff welcomes a guest who holds an office that outranks the entire U.S. Senate: . What follows is catharsis by way of gallows humor: abolishing the Senate, a certain photograph of a certain Kentucky senator, Weekend at Bernie’s, and a closing that somehow travels from a bunker in Berlin to Gandalf to the voting booth. It is funny until it is not, and it lands exactly where this whole moment lands—on the only question that matters, which is what each of us decides to do with the time we are given. You will want to see this one for yourself.

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Graham Platner is out—and on this episode of Tequila Talk, , former Republican congressman , and Chicago radio host pour a round and dig into what his implosion says about the Democratic Party. The fabricated excuses, the tattoo he lied about, the racist posts, and the sexual-misconduct allegations were all, the three agree, avoidable—the product of a party that rushes to anoint candidates and skips the vetting. From Maine to Michigan, the same pattern keeps handing Republicans, in Richard’s mother’s words, “the stick to beat you with.”

But the conversation is really about something bigger: a party at war with itself. Walsh calls it the Democrats’ “Tea Party moment”; Chew reframes it as a reckoning with the “old guard”—the Schumer-and-Jeffries leadership that, all three argue, refuses to fight. They make the case for righteous anger over decorum, for tagging Susan Collins every single day rather than waiting for an October surprise, and for candidates who take responsibility instead of pointing fingers. It is a blunt, funny, occasionally profane hour and twenty minutes about why Democrats keep beating themselves — and the surprisingly simple path to winning in 2026.

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For a while there, Michael Cohen was the resistance’s favorite redemption story—the man who turned on Trump, went to prison, and came out swearing he was one of us. This week he quietly told on himself. Where he just showed up, who he now admits he’s made peace with, and the timing of it all line up with something Ellie pulled out of the Epstein files months ago: a single email that, once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee. On this week’s Epstein Update we walk the whole thing—and we mark the exact moment the mask slipped.

And Cohen is only the opening. Ellie breaks down the Trump-family bank that’s about to exist with no real insurance, disputes that run straight through Trump’s own Treasury secretary, and an owner list the public may never be allowed to see—plus the one deadline this month where two minutes of your time actually counts for something. Kait, Cliff, and Ellie get into Todd Blanche, the survivors’ warning most of the press skated right past, and why the one agency that’s supposed to investigate all of this answers to the very man it should be investigating. It’s the conversation the Sunday shows won’t touch.

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by David Shuster

Most of us know that you can’t stop a clogged/overflowing toilet by closing the bathroom door, turning off the lights, and looking away. Yet, that is the governing philosophy of Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, and their Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. And now, the disgusting consequences are getting worse.

Before we get to the graphic and nauseating details, let me back up. Once upon a time, the federal government’s CDC maintained a robust surveillance and interdiction system – known as FoodNet – to control and stop foodborne diseases across the United States.

Cyclosporiasis, for example, is known for causing explosive and seemingly endless diarrhea, dehydration, and exhaustion.

▶ SPONSORED BY GROUND NEWS — A quick word from the sponsor that makes this column possible, and that, unlike the CDC, still believes in tracking things.

When the federal government stops collecting the data, the reporting doesn’t vanish; it just scatters. Right now more than 80 separate outlets are covering this cyclospora outbreak, and they do not agree on how alarmed you should be.

That’s the exact problem Ground News was built to solve.

It pulls every story on a topic into one place and shows you, source by source, who’s covering it, whether they lean left, center, or right, and what each side is leaving out. You get to watch this outbreak the way an epidemiologist watches a pathogen: from every angle at once, with the blind spots flagged.

Blue Amp Media readers get 40% off the Vantage plan, the tier that unlocks the full bias breakdown and Blindspot tools, at ground.news/blue.

Save 40% on Ground News!

Essentially, the Cyclospora pathogen travels on fruits and vegetables exposed to feces contaminated irrigation water.

When Cyclospora is consumed by humans, it settles in the lower intestine, rearranges the plumbing, and sends its hosts into frantic negotiations with porcelain.

For decades, CDC epidemiologists counted cases, looked for patterns, traced outbreaks, and tried to determine which salad or berry had become the latest Trojan horse for intestinal catastrophe. It was the sort of work that never earned much attention because success in public health is measured by disasters that do not occur.

However, in July 2025, the geniuses in the Trump administration, intoxicated by DOGE and the perfume of wishful thinking, looked at disease surveillance and saw not an insurance policy but an expense account.

Why pay scientists to count parasites? Why bother collecting data? Why maintain an early-warning system when the Trump administration can instead issue triumphant speeches about efficiency?

So, the CDC stopped monitoring Cyclospora. Other pathogens—including Listeria, Shigella, Campylobacter, Vibrio, and Yersinia—were also removed from the program’s core surveillance activities. (The Trump CDC has continued to monitor the most common pathogens – e-coli and salmonella).

Just one year later, health officials in 30 states are now reporting a Cyclosporiasis eruption.

Hospitals and medical clinics have confirmed nearly 3,000 cases. It is already one of the largest outbreaks in U.S. history. And with no federal monitoring or tracking data to pinpoint how it started or what food sources are contaminated and spreading it, the nastiness is intensifying.

Michigan has been especially hard hit with health officials reporting over 2,600 cases in the last month, compared to the average number of 50 in an entire year. Over the border, health authorities in Ohio are reporting 200 cases. The health departments in each state have been unable to identify a source of the outbreak, or a direction, largely because there has been no federal tracking effort.

As of this column, no deaths have been reported. However, as the outbreak spreads, mortality cases are expected. Cyclospora infections usually involve weeks of intense and watery diarrhea that can eventually turn fatal.

To be fair, cutting surveillance did not create Cyclospora any more than smashing a thermometer creates a fever. But if you decide that counting and investigating cases is an unnecessary luxury, you also decide that outbreaks will become murkier, slower to understand, and harder to contain. The parasite continues its march through the digestive tract while the Trump administration congratulates itself for having saved a few bucks in CDC costs.

Never mind that the cost of lost productivity from workers who are staying on their toilets for weeks already exceeds the amount of federal dollars the Trump team chose to cut.

There is a peculiar genius to this Trump form of governance. It resembles a dog owner who discovers poop on the living-room carpet and responds not by cleaning up the feces but by selling off the paper towels and vacuum cleaner. The MAGA pet owner then boasts that household expenditures have dropped by 12 percent, even though the aroma and stench eventually ruin other items including the carpet, clothes, furniture. Replacing such items brings a new cost.

Relatedly, public health is about prevention and treatment. Keeping down foodborne illnesses means monitoring microbes, sewage, spoiled lettuce, contaminated raspberries, and other items that may have been irrigated or handled improperly.

Most politicians, including Trump, prefer things that are bigger. Nobody ever chants, “What do we want? Better epidemiological surveillance!” Yet our nation depends just as much on people who inspect our food as on people who watch our borders.

▶ SPONSORED BY GROUND NEWS — Speaking of evidence: this column is sponsored by Ground News, and there’s a reason it fits. Biology revolves around evidence; so should your news diet.

When a story like this breaks, left-leaning outlets frame it as a “massive, fast-growing” scandal and right-leaning outlets frame it as a contained blip “within the normal range.”

Ground News lays those framings side by side so you can see the spin instead of swimming in it, and its Blindspot feed shows you the stories one side is barely covering at all.

Get Ground News For 40% Off

Track the outbreak, and everything else this administration would rather you not connect, with 40% off Vantage at ground.news/blue.

Diseases do not respect or care about slogans. Parasites are indifferent to DOGE talking points. They cannot be persuaded by bombastic Trump press conferences. They cannot be frightened by executive orders. They respond only to biology—and biology has a habit of revolving around evidence.

Evidence, unfortunately, requires data.

And data requires people, laboratories, and budgets.

Those are exactly the things that have become expendable under Trump. It’s all random and dependent on Trump’s gut feelings. There is no planning and no consultation with experts. Iran? The Lincoln reflecting pool? The economy? Everything Trump touches turns to shit. Only now by touching and gutting the CDC, thousands of Americans are literally shitting uncontrollably.

There is a fitting symbolism in all of this. An administration that refuses to keep track of a disease has concluded that the best response to a torrent of excrement is to stop looking at the toilet.

▶ SPONSORED BY GROUND NEWS — One last note before Nature balances the books: the whole lesson of this column is that you can’t manage what you refuse to measure.

That goes for parasites, and it goes for the news. Ground News hands you the measuring tools the CDC just threw away: every source on a story, its bias rating, its factuality, and what’s missing from the coverage.

Go to ground.news/blue for 40% off the Vantage plan and start seeing the full picture.

It’s the cheapest insurance policy in this entire column.

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The result, predictably, is that the sewage keeps flowing, the misery keeps rising, and costs keep surging.

Nature, unlike Trump, always balances the books.

Thanks to Our Sponsor - Ground News

MORE FROM BLUE AMP MEDIA

Folks, I don’t get to make announcements like this very often, so let me hop right to it! Blue Amp Media is partnering with Defiance.org.

If you don’t know Defiance, it’s the nonprofit founded by my pal Miles Taylor—the guy who blew the whistle on Trump from inside his own administration as “Anonymous,” with a New York Times op-ed, and whose reward when Trump got back in was an executive order investigating him for treason. Treason. For criticizing the president.

Most people would have taken the hint and gone quiet. Miles and his wife did the opposite: they built a club to fight back. And because you’re part of the Blue Amp community, you can now join that club for free—three full months of Defiance.org membership, for $0, when you sign up at defiance.org/blueamp.

Here’s what makes Defiance different, and why I wanted this partnership: they don’t just talk. Every single Wednesday since they launched last October, Defiance has taken a concrete action against Trump’s corruption. And they’re always the actions you ask yourself why nobody’s discussing. The things that wake you up in the middle of the night to wonder: “who’s protecting us from this?”

Defiance always seems to swoop in at that moment—like they were thinking the exact same thing—to jump into the breach to protect our freedoms.

They’ve backed some of the biggest lawsuits against Trump—including fights they are winning at the Supreme Court. They seeded the coalition of local prosecutors now holding federal agents accountable when they break the law—Mary Moriarty in Minneapolis has already charged ICE agents with crimes. Defiance helped fund the Campaign Legal Center’s suit against Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional mail-in-ballot executive order. And this week they put $15,000 behind the effort to shine a light on the Dilley detention center in Texas and get kids out of there. More than a hundred actions and counting. That’s not content. That’s some serious freakin action.

Claim Your 3 FREE Months!

In our conversation—watch it above—Miles told the story of how it all started. When the executive order targeting him was issued, everyone in his life said the same thing: please don’t poke the bear. His wife said the opposite. Defy it, she said, because if Trump can sign one order that blows up a family’s life, he’ll sign a hundred more. She was right—a Reuters investigation counted 430 acts of revenge in his first nine months back in office. We also got into the election protection work Defiance is doing right now: making sure prosecutors and state attorneys general are ready before federal agents show up at the polls, not after. And yes, we talked about the Trump–Epstein Bookmobile—a mobile reading room of all 3.5 million Epstein files, built with survivors and the Trumpsonian, that rolls out of Washington at the end of this month and travels coast to coast through the midterms.

Claim Your 3 FREE Months!

One more thing you should know: nobody owns these guys. No billionaire pulls the strings. Defiance is a member-funded nonprofit, and at least half of what they raise goes straight out the door to front-line groups doing the next most important thing—prosecutors, whistleblowers, legal teams, organizers protecting your vote. When you become a member, you’re not buying content. You’re funding the fight, and you’re getting the thing so many of us have been missing: the feeling of actually doing something. So here’s the ask, and it’s an easy one.

Go to defiance.org/blueamp and claim your three free months. No gimmicks, no fine print.

So many BAM supporters devoted to democracy often ask me “I post about this on Facebook, I talk to my friends, but, Cliff, what can I actually do?” This is the answer I’ve been waiting to give you. Go to defiance.org/blueamp, sign up, and spend three months inside what Defiance calls the club for the courageous. For free! Just because you’re a Blue Amp reader. Show up to their weekly action briefings. Help pick the next fight. Then come back and tell me how it feels.

Strength comes in numbers, folks. Courage is contagious. Seeing someone else stand up and be counted will always add to the number of those willing to fight. So we now add our number to theirs.

—Cliff

By Eric J. Lullove, DPM, CWSP, MAPWCA, FFPM RCPS(Glasg)
Contributing Medical Editor, Blue Amp Media

To every Michigan resident heading into the August 4 Democratic Senate primary: Read this one carefully, because it lives in my professional lane. And before anyone files it under “partisan attack,” understand what this piece is and isn’t. It is not an endorsement of anyone. It is not a case for a party. It is a case for a process—the same credentialing process every licensed clinician in this country is held to, applied without regard to whose name is on the ballot.

This week, Mehdi Hasan—no conservative, and by his own record a broadly sympathetic interviewer of this candidate—asked a question most reporters wouldn’t touch. Abdul El-Sayed has repeatedly called himself a physician. Yet he holds no valid state medical license in New York or Michigan. Hasan pressed the obvious follow-up: Did you tell the truth? El-Sayed didn’t answer it. He pivoted—to your child’s education, to his tenure as Detroit’s health director, to the claim that he’s eliminated more medical debt than “most doctors.” He then pointed to his diploma, noting he graduated from a school literally called Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and suggested anyone with a problem could take it up with the university.

That the questioner was an ally is the whole point. When the person most inclined to give a candidate the benefit of the doubt still must stop and ask whether the biography is accurate, the issue has left the realm of partisanship and entered the realm of fact. And in my field, it’s a serious fact.

Why I Get to Say This to Michigan

Let me be clear about my standing to write these words to this state, because it matters. I grew up in Michigan. I graduated from high school there and earned my college degree there. My roots are still in that ground—family, friends, and a set of values I carry into every exam room and every hearing to this day. I am not a stranger parachuting in with an opinion about a place I’ve never lived. When I address Michigan voters, I address them as one of their own, with the standing that comes from having been shaped by that community.

That is precisely why I can make these statements with the phrasing I’m using. I know what Michigan expects of the people who serve it, because Michigan is where I learned it. The state raised me on the idea that your word and your credentials should match. This isn’t a lecture from the outside. It’s a message from someone who came up in the same places these voters did, asking them to hold to the same standard the rest of us were taught there.

A Diploma Is Not a License

Let me draw the line cleanly, because I’ve spent a career on the credentialing side of medicine—in audit rooms and appeals hearings where the difference between a degree and a license is the whole case. This line does not move for Democrats or Republicans. It does not move for candidates I might vote for or against. It is fixed.

Abdul El-Sayed earned a Doctor of Medicine degree. That is real, and it is not nothing. But an MD is an academic credential—proof you completed medical school. A license is something entirely different. It is a state’s active grant of authority to practice medicine, issued only after residency training, board examination, and ongoing accountability to a licensing board that can suspend or revoke it. The public record shows El-Sayed has never held a medical license in Michigan or New York. He has the diploma. He does not have the license.

The word physician is the license word. It signals to a patient, a voter, a hospital, or a court that the state stands behind you and that a board can hold you to account. It is not a synonym for “went to medical school.” It is not a vibe. It is a legally regulated title, and both states in question say so in statute—statutes written by legislatures of both parties, enforced against members of both parties, and neutral on their face.

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This week they are lying to your face about Mitch McConnell—and they are betting you will not trust your own eyes. In a livestream that ran an hour and a half and never once dragged, Cliff Schecter sat down with Kait Justice and Ellie Leonard to take apart the AI-polished story that McConnell is up, energetic, and racing back to work after cardiac arrest and CPR at eighty-four. Watch Scott Jennings’s eyes as he repeats it. Then ask the question the whole episode is built around: who benefits when a party manufactures a recovery and dares you to disbelieve it?

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