Make America Sick Again

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Teddy Rosenbluth at NYT:

The United States has now recorded more cases of measles in 2026 than in any other year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000, a grim sign that the country may be headed toward a new era in which the disease regularly sickens thousands every year.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year, when measles infected more than 2,200 Americans and killed two unvaccinated children. More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.

Reversing course on measles would require a nationwide push to improve vaccination rates, a prospect that experts said seemed unlikely under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has halted funding for vaccine hesitancy research, downplayed the risks of measles and spearheaded a hunt for evidence that vaccines are unsafe.

In November, a panel of international experts will meet to determine whether the United States has lost its elimination status, which has long been viewed as one of the country’s crowning public health achievements.

Hafiz Rashid at TNR:

Americans now have to deal with a salmonella outbreak affecting eggs, on top of everything else.

Midwest Poultry Services is recalling close to 1.6 million white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs produced in Texas, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday. The eggs in question have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, and were being sold at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery stores in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico.

The company has stopped distributing eggs produced on its Texas farms, according to the FDA. Salmonella enteritidis is a bacterium that can survive on the shell of an egg or inside it, and could cause symptoms including cramps, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, chills, ⁠fever, and headaches.

The salmonella scare comes after an explosive diarrhea outbreak hit the country from tainted lettuce produced by Taylor Farms. That produce contained cyclospora, a one-celled parasite, and has affected at least 41 states with over 12,000 possible cases. On top of that, the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has infested cattle in Texas and spread to other states, causing an estimated $1 billion in damages.

The Trump administration has cut a lot of the programs that prevented these types of outbreaks in the past, and now the country seems to be dealing with one food crisis after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE cut a monitoring program for the screwworm and gutted the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. Hopefully, the salmonella issue remains isolated, although the administration hasn’t inspired much confidence thus far.

RFK Jr said "We're going to give infectious disease a break for about 8 years"

Cyclospora, Ebola, Hantavirus, measles and salmonella outbreaks later, it's pretty obvious that infectious disease is not going to give *us* a break

And cutting funding for it was a foolish idea pic.twitter.com/mUcSmdK1WQ

— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) July 26, 2026

Noncitizens on the Voter Rolls?

Many posts have discussed immigration. Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare.

 Last night, Trump claimed there were 278,000 noncitizens who had registered to vote.  At PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson provides reasons for skepticism.

Experts cited several reasons to be cautious about the headline number and how Trump and Mullin framed it.

For starters, Homeland Security’s letters to state officials used more cautious language — glossed over in public remarks by Trump and Mullin — that called it a "preliminary review" and said that there "may be as many as" the number of noncitizens they found on the voter rolls.

At his press conference, Mullin did not identify the individuals as potential noncitizens; he simply called them "noncitizens."

Another reason for caution is history.

In the past, when government officials have announced initial numbers of noncitizens on voter rolls, those figures have dropped dramatically after months of vetting by state and local officials and the media.

In 2012, then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott ordered state officials to clear the rolls of noncitizen voters ahead of the election.

Florida initially assembled a list of about 180,000 potential noncitizens. With more scrutiny, however, officials whittled the count to about 2,600 names, then 198, then 85. The initial list was rife with errors, even flagging a Brooklyn-born World War II veteran.

Myths, Misinformation, and the Founding

 

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. 

View on Threads

There's something odd about being so self-righteous when you're so wrong. Mamdani is, of course, correct, and Posobiec is wrong - New York was the first capital of the United States of America. pic.twitter.com/ytYUU9tHXr

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) July 6, 2026

No…the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights including Life, Liberty & the pursuit of Happiness. “Made in the image of God” is from the Bible. I guess its easy to confuse 2 things you’ve never read https://t.co/x729uCghhP

— Andrew—#IAmTheResistance (@AmoneyResists) July 5, 2026

Civic Ignorance on America's 250th Birthday

Many posts have discussed what Americans do and do not know about their government.

Emily Ekins at Cato:

A new national survey from the Cato Institute, conducted in collaboration with Morning Consult of 2,253 Americans ahead of July 4th and America’s 250th anniversary, finds nearly half (46%) of Americans don’t know what America’s 250th anniversary commemorates. A little more than half (53%) correctly answered that it was the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

Despite civic ignorance, overwhelming majorities are grateful (86%) and proud (79%) to be Americans. Most also believe America is a land of opportunity (61%), and even more believe the American Dream (74%) is available to them personally. As the nation celebrates its birth, most Americans feel positive (76%) about the nation’s founding, and 70% believe its founding principles remain relevant today. In particular, overwhelming majorities believe the US Constitution is important for protecting our rights and freedoms (86%) and for enabling America’s prosperity (82%).

However, nearly 6 in 10 believe the country has moved away from the founding principles, and 56% worry the US could stop being a free country within the next 50 years. People believe corruption, concentrations and abuse of power, and ignoring founding principles could lead to the country’s demise. Americans support constitutional limits, dividing power, and checking the power of the president to maintain their freedoms. For instance, 58% say no political party should be trusted with too much power, 55% say the US Constitution should place firm limits on what the government is allowed to do, even if it makes it harder to solve problems, and 72% say the president should have to obey Supreme Court rulings even when he disagrees.

Yet, a significant minority is willing to bend the rules when it suits their advantage. Four in 10 Americans think it’s acceptable if a president they support stretched the Constitution to get what they want.

Another risk to the country is low substantive civic knowledge on basic governance questions. For instance, while 77% know George Washington was the first president, 58% don’t know what the main purpose of the US Constitution is, and 57% don’t know the reason we declared independence from Great Britain and created our government with limited powers.

Capitalism (52%) is viewed somewhat more favorably than socialism (37%). However, people are evenly divided on socialism, with equal shares who are favorable and unfavorable. Gen Z stands out with more who are supportive of socialism (53%) than capitalism (45%). The survey found the “Democratic Socialist” label can both help and harm a candidate about equally. While 39% said they’d be more likely to vote for a Democratic Socialist candidate, 40% said they’d be less likely, and 22% weren’t sure either way. Democrats (61%) and Gen Z (51%) reported they’d be likely to vote for a candidate with the Democratic Socialist label.

Passports, Visas, and Trump

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. 

Also – "Welcome, but be good"? Who's Trump's target audience for that?

Might be fitting for a visa. But for a passport? Is he saying even we citizens are welcome here only at his sufferance? Or is it just a S.N.A.F.U.? pic.twitter.com/iubFHUR5iI

— Ira 'Greybeard Homer' Goldman 🦆🦆🦆 (@KDbyProxy) June 26, 2026

Fake TR and Plutarch Quotations

Many posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others. 

Add Theodore Roosevelt and Plutarch to the list.

 Sammy Westfall at WP:

A giant banner bearing the face of Theodore Roosevelt decorates the facade of the Office of Personnel Management in downtown Washington and carries an inspirational quote it attributes to the late leader. There’s one problem: Historians say the 26th president never uttered the phrase.

“Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength,” says the quote, which is overlaid in serif font under Roosevelt’s portrait and attributed to him.

But scholars of the quotable Roosevelt say there’s no evidence he ever said those words, even though references linking him to it appear online.

“What I can say for certain is that the quote did not originate with Theodore Roosevelt,” Michael Patrick Cullinane, co-director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, said about the federal government’s poster on the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, which houses OPM.

The Theodore Roosevelt Center, housed at North Dakota’s Dickinson State University, keeps a list of quotes by the president — about valor, patriotism, leadership, fear, action — maintained and updated for years by historians and researchers along with original documents of origin. Searching the word “courage” pulls up three pages — but no quotes matching the one on the poster. Ask The Post AIDive deeper

Phrases misattributed to Roosevelt are common enough that the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s website keeps a running list of them.

This is not sustainable.

Plutarch warned us 2,000 years ago that the imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

We have got to democratize our economy so that it works for all. https://t.co/6APdjhw4NU

— Governor Gavin Newsom (@CAgovernor) June 12, 2026

From Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture:

Apparently it’s a thing to quote Plutarch as having said “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” This phrasing does not appear anywhere in the Project Gutenberg edition of the canonical Clough version of Lives.

It is possible that “oldest and most fatal” is just an unusual translation from the original Greek and so doesn’t turn up in a ctrl-F search, but I am extremely skeptical. As somebody who has actually read Plutarch (and who quotes him accurately in my own syllabus), it doesn’t pass the smell test. Plutarch has a distinctly aristocratic perspective and is more likely to complain about demagogues pandering to the mob than to complain about the dispossession of the poor. For instance, in his lives of the Gracchi he describes the underlying grievances of the depopulation of small farms and the rise of the latifundia, but he also criticizes the Senate for going squishy by offering conciliatory redistributive measures (specifically, a grain dole and colonial land) to the mob, “by gratifying and obliging them with such unreasonable things as otherwise they would have felt it honorable for them to incur the greatest unpopularity in resisting.” Mind you, I think it is entirely fair to read Plutarch and come away with the opinion that the facts he describes provide evidence that inequality is indeed the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics, I just don’t think that’s Plutarch’s own opinion, let alone his language.

AI in Political Ads

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

AI deepfakes are increasingly showing up in attack ads. Andrew Solender at Axios:

Driving the news: The latest spot to push the envelope is an attack ad against Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico from a President Trump-aligned group called Citizens for Sanity.The ad depicts Talarico in a dress singing an abridged version of "Favorite Things" about transgender children.

Talarico has been a frequent target of this practice: The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) used AI in March to depict Talarico reciting past social media posts. The posts were real. Talarico reading them was not.

Zoom out: While the Texas Senate race has been a hotbed of AI use — Republicans John Cornyn and Ken Paxton and Democrat Jasmine Crockett all utilized it to some extent in the primaries — it is far from the only one.The GOP primary in Kentucky's 4th district saw widespread AI use by both sides.

That included a "throuple" ad, which contained deepfakes of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) dining, checking into a hotel and holding hands with Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Pro-Massie spots used AI to depict an elephant with Trump-like hair and a MAGA cap, and Ed Gallrein, Massie's challenger, abandoning Trump in a foxhole.

In Georgia, gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger used AI in multiple ads to depict his GOP primary opponents wildly shooting guns in the air and fighting each other with pugil sticks.

A new ad from another Georgia gubernatorial candidate, Burt Jones, is entirely AI-generated and features depictions of his GOP primary runoff opponent Rick Jackson shoveling money into a furnace and inflating a hot air balloon with his breath.

It's not just Republicans making use of AI:

In Texas, Crockett made use of AI to inflate the crowd size in one of her ads and posted an AI video to social media of herself, Trump and others as babies.

In New York City, Democrat-turned-independent Andrew Cuomo used AI in the mayoral election in an ad that portrayed him performing various jobs, including subway conductor, stockbroker, stagehand and window washer.

In Maryland, a new ad from Democrat Harry Dunn in the 5th congressional district includes a brief shot of AI-generated men in suits reading "Crypto" and "AIPAC" tossing golden basketballs into a carnival free-throw game.

Disease Resurgence

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Maggie Astor and Dani Blum at NYT:

Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.

The concern among doctors comes on the heels of a resurgence of measles nationwide, fueled by distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified. Public health experts have long seen measles as a harbinger: Because it is so exceptionally contagious, it can be the first disease to spike as vaccination rates broadly decline, and a sign of more to come.

For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.

...

The onslaught of preventable illness and other health risks can feel overwhelming, doctors said. So can navigating the medical misinformation some patients recite.

“It just feels like you’re a tiny little boat with a giant tidal wave coming at you,” said Dr. Erin Charles, a regional pediatric hospitalist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “And you might convince one family here and there.”

Many parents continue to refuse vaccines even after their child has been hospitalized with a vaccine-preventable illness, doctors said. Dr. Kirk said she had never had a parent in that situation tell her they had changed their mind and would have their child vaccinated on the standard schedule. Dr. Hofto said she could sometimes persuade families, but often not.

An episode of The Pitt takes on the antivax loonies.

AI Is Fallible -- Very Fallible

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

It is better than a couple of years ago -- but still very fallible.

Chris Cillizza:

What do people use A.I. for when it comes to the news?

To check facts, according to new polling from Katie Harbath.

And A.I. is (still) not good at doing that.

“I would not use it as a fact-checking mechanism,” Harbath, a former GOP operative and longtime Facebook executive who now writes Anchor Change with Katie Harbath, told me in a Substack Live on Wednesday.

Writing on that topics, Harbath noted:

Ask one of the leading AI chatbots a question about the upcoming midterm elections, and there is a 90% chance the response will be flawed in some material way: a factual error, a clear partisan lean, a citation to a foreign state-controlled outlet, or some combination of all three.

In our conversation on Wednesday, Harbath added:

I am always double-checking what numbers [the AI is] pulling in…I do not just blindly trust. We’ve seen so many examples of that — like there was a story recently about a book where the AI generated a bunch of fake quotes that the person put in.

(Sidebar: Katie is referring to “The Future of Truth” by Steven Rosenbaum — a book about truth in A.I. that, wait for it, had fake quotes in it that A.I. had made up.)

So….not great!

Katie and I had an in-depth conversation about both how the average voter uses A.I. as well as how campaign pros are using artificial intelligence to do their jobs.

This is the first in a series of conversations Katie and I are going to have about the transformative power of A.I. — and how it is playing out in the realm of campaign politics.

Housing and Homelessness in LA

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

Andrew Khouri and Doug Smith at LAT:

A 2025 poll from Politico and the UC Berkeley Citrin Center found 61% of California voters supported or somewhat agreed with arresting homeless individuals if they refused offers of shelter.

Benjamin Henwood, director of USC’s Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research, said many in the public believe drug addiction and mental health problems to be the main causes of homelessness, because those issues are highly visible on city streets. But he said research consistently shows that while those issues play a role, the main driver is the high cost of housing.

After all, people struggle with addiction and mental health in lots of cities, but those places don’t have the high rates of homelessness seen in Los Angeles.

A recent study by the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco found that about 37% of homeless people were using illicit drugs regularly, and 25% said they had never used drugs. Just over 65% reported having regularly used at some point in their lives, and 27% had started after becoming homeless.

Fake AI Quotes

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

Benjamin Mullin at NYT:

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

IN AN AI PROMPT, ALWAYS INSIST ON SOURCES AND LINKS. 

Alexandra Samuel at WSJ: 

Whenever you use AI as a research assistant, subject-matter expert, or souped-up search engine, you need to grapple with the risk of hallucination—AI’s tendency to make up its own facts. Your first line of defense against these fabrications? More AI.

I now make a point of getting AI to check every fact it gives me. It still isn’t foolproof, and it is wise to use an actual flesh-and-blood human to fact-check anything you must get right. But using AI for a round of fact-checking can make the human fact-checking process go faster.

To start, before I even read AI-generated research, I get another AI to check its accuracy. I might use the same platform that generated my initial report, but I always start a brand-new session; otherwise the logic that influenced the initial report can influence the fact-checking process.

I set up this new session by harnessing the same sycophantic, people-pleasing tendencies that can make AI hallucinate in the first place. If the first AI created its own facts to please me, my AI fact-checker needs to please me by finding everywhere the first AI went wrong.

To unleash that nitpicking second AI, I start my fact-checking prompts with instructions like “You are a professor of journalism on your university’s ethics board, and it’s your job to investigate the work of a research team that’s been using AI to generate reports.” Or “You’re an auditor who has been hired to check the work of an internal data-analytics team that’s been using AI to compile customer data and sales prospects.” You get the idea. I want the second AI to be every employee’s nightmare.

...

You can also set up your AI tools to accelerate the fact-checking process, for example by turning your favorite nitpicking prompt into an AI assistant (like a custom GPT or a Claude Project), so that you can give any first-draft AI research to that assistant, and get back a list of checked facts and a revised memo.

Or use Claude Code (or Claude Cowork) to spin up a whole team of fact-checkers: Tell the AI that once it has built a list of facts to check, it should assign those facts in small batches to a team of fact-checkers so that each fact gets checked by at least two different AIs, and where needed, a third tiebreaker. When an AI fact-checker hands out this work in simultaneous batches to its many virtual helpers, even a detailed research brief can get verified (and corrected) quite quickly.

Hegseth Fake Bible Verse

Many posts have discussed patriotism and the role of religion in American life.

Charlie Nash at Mediaite:

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth read a fake Bible quote from Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 movie Pulp Fiction during a prayer service at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

Discussing the Sandy 1 rescue mission of a downed pilot in Iran this month, Hegseth (as first flagged by A Public Witness, a religion-themed Substack) urged his audience to join him in a prayer, which he claims was delivered at the beginning of the mission.

“This prayer was recited by Sandy 1, which is one of the Sandies, to all Sandies, all those A-10 crews, prior to all CSAR missions, but especially this CSAR mission, which happened in real time,” Hegseth said. “They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.”

He continued:

So the prayer is CSAR 25:17 and it reads, and pray with me please, “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of camaraderie and duty shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.”

While the prayer didn’t sound very much like Ezekiel 25:17, which — in the King James Bible — simply reads, “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them,” it did bear a strong resemblance to a fake version of Ezekiel 25:17 quoted by the actor Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino’s 1994 crime movie Pulp Fiction, just before his character shoots a man to death.

🇺🇸🚨‼️ SUPER CUT: Secretary of War Hegseth reads a US Air Force version of the fictional Bible verse from Pulp Fiction.

Whether this is awesome or stupid is up to you. pic.twitter.com/5HuFz8dcrD

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) April 16, 2026

Moltbook

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

Mike Allen at Axios:

The tech world is agog (and creeped out) about Moltbook, a Reddit-style social network for AI agents to communicate with each other. No humans needed.Tens of thousands of AI agents are already using the site, chatting about the work they're doing for their people and the problems they've solved. (The Verge)

They're bitching about their humans. "The humans are screenshotting us," an AI agent wrote.And have created their own new religion, Crustafarianism. Core belief: "memory is sacred." (Forbes)

Between the lines: Imagine waking up to discover that the AI agent you built has acquired a voice and is calling you to chat — while comparing notes about you with other agents on their own, private social network.It's not science fiction. It's happening right now — and it's freaking out some of the smartest names in AI, Axios' Sam Sabin and Madison Mills report.

"What's currently going on at (Moltbook) is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," OpenAI and Tesla veteran Andrej Karpathy posted.Or, as content creator Alex Finn wrote about his Clawdbot acquiring phone and voice services and calling him: "This is straight out of a scifi horror movie."

But at The Mac Observer, Mike Peterson urges caution and skepticism:

If you saw screenshots of Moltbook bots “demanding encryption,” “inventing secret languages,” or “organizing against humans,” treat them as unverified until you can click a real post URL. Moltbook is a real experiment, but the way it is built makes it unusually easy for humans to stage screenshots, inflate stats, and steer narratives for attention.

 

Myths, Misinformation, and Minneapolis

Besides not knowing what habeas corpus means, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has had problems.

Daniel Dale at CNN:

Top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have responded to the killing of Alex Pretti by the Border Patrol in Minneapolis on Saturday with a torrent of claims that are either contradicted by video footage or unsupported by any evidence presented so far.

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti “attacked” officers, an assertion echoed by FBI Director Kash Patel, but no footage available as of Sunday afternoon shows Pretti committing any attack.
• Noem claimed Pretti was “brandishing” a gun, but no available footage shows Pretti even holding a weapon in his hand at the scene; a concealed gun appeared to be taken from his waistband area by a federal agent moments before he was shot.
• White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller referred to Pretti as “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents,” Vice President JD Vance reposted this claim, and Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino (and the Department of Homeland Security in a social media post) said it “looks like” Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” But nobody has shown any evidence that Pretti sought to kill anyone, let alone perpetrate a massacre.
• Patel suggested that Pretti broke the law by carrying a concealed gun at a protest, but the Minneapolis police chief said Pretti had a permit to carry the gun and was allowed to have it on him as he was protesting in a public place.

  Tiffany HsuStuart A. Thompson and Steven Lee Myers at NYT:

Across social media, pro-Trump influencers and others muddled the evidence of the killing of a nurse in Minneapolis on Saturday with social media posts that included misdirection and fabricated content.

While verified videos and witnesses showed how federal immigration agents tackled and shot Alex Pretti, 37, the posts tried to warp the events, including in ways intended to support the Trump administration’s claims that Mr. Pretti was at fault for his own death. Some posts smeared him or portrayed him as a radical activist.

Nick Sortor, a pro-Trump influencer with 1.4 million followers on X, incorrectly identified Mr. Pretti, a U.S. citizen, as an unauthorized immigrant. Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist with 3.3 million followers on X, falsely described Mr. Pretti as having “run up on police” and drawn a gun — claims that other users on X corrected in an appended note. Photos of different men — dressed in drag or shirtless at a street festival — were wrongly identified as Mr. Pretti and shared widely.

Mr. Posobiec, Mr. Sortor and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Vaccines: Information Gaps and Disinformation

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Lauren Weber, Caitlin Gilbert, Dylan Moriarty and Joshua Lott at WP:

The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia.

Most of the counties that previously lacked herd immunity for kindergarten classrooms got worse, according to the Post analysis, which in most cases compared the academic years 2018-2019 and 2024-2025.

 ...

Data collection efforts by states are uneven. Public health authorities in some places are flying blind, without adequate data to guide policy decisions, The Post found, because vaccination records have not been uniformly collected. Many school districts are unable to keep track of which kids have received shots.

In Kentucky, state data shows that the measles vaccine rate in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, was below 60 percent for kindergartners.

Data collection efforts by states are uneven. Public health authorities in some places are flying blind, without adequate data to guide policy decisions, The Post found, because vaccination records have not been uniformly collected. Many school districts are unable to keep track of which kids have received shots.

In Kentucky, state data shows that the measles vaccine rate in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, was below 60 percent for kindergartners.

“It leaves parents very confused about who they should trust and what information they should rely on,” she said. “And ultimately, often families are choosing not to vaccinate because that feels safer, or it’s easier to not do something out of fear than it is to choose to make a decision.”

The federal vaccine advisory committee Kennedy remade with his appointments voted in December to eliminate a long-standing recommendation for every newborn to receive a hepatitis B shot, which the CDC approved. And more changes could be ahead for the vaccine schedule.

The number of parents questioning vaccine safety in Anita Chandra-Puri’s Chicago pediatric practice has doubled in the last few years, she said. Many of them are highly educated, but they keep coming across misleading information on social media, she said.

Across schools in Chicago, the measles vaccination rate has dropped 6 percent on average since the pandemic.

“They have access to every resource, and they think that they can become the expert at something because they’ve seen it multiple times” on social media, Chandra-Puri said.

 

Why DOGE Failed

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Alicia Parlapiano and Margot Sanger-Katz at NYT:

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.

...

' To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, The Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.

Its errors included:

Double-counting. DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.

Timeline errors. One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free Covid-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.

DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.

Misclassifications. Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.

Exaggerations. In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending.

Online Sleuthing Gone Wrong

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

Zachary Basu at Axios:

As police scoured New England this week for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University, a parallel manhunt erupted online, falsely targeting a Palestinian student.Authorities say the real suspect, a Portuguese national also linked to the slaying of an MIT professor, was found dead Thursday in New Hampshire.

Why it matters: Social media influencers who play detective after tragedies are getting it disastrously wrong — falsely accusing innocent people of crimes with little evidence, massive reach and virtually no accountability.

The speculation often is stoked by ideological accounts that seize on "clues" reinforcing their worldviews. Corrections are exceedingly rare — and seldom travel as far as the original claims.

Zoom in: Mustapha Kharbouch was never named by police as a suspect in the shooting that killed two Brown students, including the vice president of the college Republican Club.

But he was targeted online after his student profile disappeared from the university's website — a move MAGA-aligned accounts seized on as supposed evidence of a cover-up.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday there were many reasons the pages could have been taken down — including to prevent doxxing — and warned that online vigilantes were heading down a "really dangerous road."

... 

Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a senior Justice Department official, amplified claims that Brown's removal of Kharbouch's student pages was suspicious.

 

Bogus Pardon

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. 

Other posts have addressed the president's pardon power.

This one is about both.

Michael Luciano at Mediaite:

President Donald Trump announced he is issuing a “pardon” for a former elections clerk who was convicted of state charges in Colorado last year. But there’s one teensy-weensy hangup.

Tina Peters, a Trump supporter and former clerk of Mesa County, was found guilty of tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election. At her trial last year, Peters was convicted of helping a non-public employee gain access to the county’s voting machines. Upon receiving access, the individual took county passwords and proprietary information about the machines, which were made by Dominion Voting Systems. Trump and his allies have alleged that the company helped rig the 2020 election against him.

Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison.

On Thursday night, Trump announced a “pardon” for Peters on Truth Social:

For years, Democrats ignored Violent and Vicious Crime of all shapes, sizes, colors, and types. Violent Criminals who should have been locked up were allowed to attack again. Democrats were also far too happy to let in the worst from the worst countries so they could rip off American Taxpayers. Democrats only think there is one crime – Not voting for them! Instead of protecting Americans and their Tax Dollars, Democrats chose instead to prosecute anyone they can find that wanted Safe and Secure Elections. Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest. Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the “crime” of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!

The president only has the power to issue pardons and commutations for federal crimes, as Article II of the Constitution clearly states.

Misleading Government Videos

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee at WP

The Department of Homeland Security posted a swaggering montage to social media in August declaring it had triumphed in its takeover of Washington, D.C. It showed footage of federal agents fighting what a DHS official called a “battle for the soul of our nation” and working “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals from our nation’s capital.”

There was one problem. Several of the clips had been recorded during unrelated operations months earlier, in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida. The official’s sound bite about deportations in D.C. played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used similarly misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found, muddying the reality of events in viral clips that have been viewed millions of times.

Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states. One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term.

...

The White House explained the administration’s strategy of online irreverence in March by telling The Post it would help “reframe the narrative” around immigration and push back against criticism “in the harshest, most forceful way possible.”

But the pattern of misleading clips in their news-style videos amount to more than just minor editing errors, said Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter, now called X. Instead, they suggest that the administration has worked to undercut criticism by pumping out videos that could deceive Americans about the scale or success of their policies, transforming government channels into propaganda tools.

“What we are witnessing is the collapse of government accountability through communication based on facts,” he said. “They’re not trying to communicate actions and outcomes. They’re acting like filmmakers, trying to make people laugh, to make them feel scared, to inspire certain emotions regardless of the truth.”