PALM BEACH, Florida – President Donald Trump went on a Truth Social posting spree Sunday evening, with one of his messages blasting Democrats in the U.S. Senate who are delaying confirmation of his nominees.

“Democrats are purposefully delaying virtually all of my Nominees,” Trump began.

“No matter how good and well qualified someone is, they are taking maximum time for approval – and laughing about it. They’re having a good time at the Country’s expense and safety. If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were nominated for a position, the Democrats would take it out to the last moment before having to approve. It is disgraceful!

“They can’t get over the landslide loss suffered in the Presidential Election. But the Democrats don’t understand, with what they’re doing, that their losses will only get greater. Republicans must GET TOUGH – AND MUST GET TOUGH VERY FAST. We need our Nominees NOW, for the Safety and Good of our Country!”

Trump also defended his slapping of tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

“Anybody that’s against Tariffs, including the Fake News Wall Street Journal, and Hedge Funds, is only against them because these people or entities are controlled by China, or other foreign or domestic companies,” Trump indicated.

“Anybody that loves and believes in the United States of America is in favor of Tariffs. They should have never ended, in favor of the Income Tax System, in 1913. The response to Tariffs has been FANTASTIC!

The president mentioned some good news concerning the water situation in fire-ravaged California.

“The water is flowing in California,” Trump noted. “These once empty ‘halfpipes’ are now brimming with beautiful, clean water, and heading to farmers throughout the State, and to Los Angeles.

“Too bad they refused to do this during my First Term – There would have been no fires! I want to thank our Great Military, and the Army Corps of Engineers, for their LOVE of our Country, and SPEED in getting this Emergency DONE!”

Trump also talked about land grabs taking place in South Africa, and threatened legal action against that nation.

“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY. It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention. A massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see.

“The United States won’t stand for it, we will act. Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”

Is the news we hear every day actually broadcasting messages from God? The answer is an absolute yes! Find out how!

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SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly said Friday during her show that she would be watching Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy’s vote for Health and Human Services (HHS) nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., adding she had already phoned his office.

Kennedy appeared before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday and Thursday, with lawmakers grilling him on his stance on issues like vaccines. On “The Megyn Kelly Show,” the SiriusXM host said she personally called Cassidy’s office to encourage him to confirm Kennedy.

“I personally called. It was actually very funny. They took the number down. The guy was like, ‘The Megyn Kelly?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, the Megyn Kelly,’” Kelly said. “He was like, ‘Do you live in Louisiana? I’m like, ‘No, but I have a loud mouth and I have a lot of listeners who do.’”

During Kennedy’s Thursday appearance before the lawmakers, Cassidy voiced his concerns about the HHS nominee and said he was “struggling” to support Kennedy due to his past actions “undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments.” Kelly said that Cassidy’s staff  gave her an email for listeners to contact the senator’s office. Kelly said that Cassidy’s team needs to hear from Kennedy supporters.

“They need to hear from us directly. Here’s why I feel so passionately about it. Forget all that stuff about the MMR vaccine, which will not be banned,” Kelly said. “Trump has said it will not be banned. Bobby has said it will not be banned. Bobby’s past work to ask questions about it is in the past. He’s not going to make this an issue.”

WATCH:

“He’s made that really clear. He has his beliefs about it, but Trump is the boss. Look at the COVID vaccine and what you said, how no one’s allowed to ask questions about it,” Kelly added. “This is about more than the MMR vaccine, which is fine. It’s in place. It’s not going anywhere. It’s about a whole, I know it gets overused, but the medical industrial complex that cares more about hooking you on drugs. Like SSRI’s and taking every single vaccine so that they can make a ton of money like Pfizer did, like Moderna did. They cannot be sued.”

The SiriusXM host went on to discuss a previous episode featuring 29-year-old professional mountain biker Kyle Warner, who told Kelly how the COVID-19 vaccine impacted his life and how he was turned away from the hospital after warning about side effects he believed he was suffering from.

“Then they [Big Pharma] don’t care when you get back injured, vaccine injured, like Kyle. They don’t give a sh**. Well, RFKJ cares. Jay Bhattacharya is going to care,” Kelly said. “Marty McCarry, ideally at FDA, is going to care. You need a disruptor like RFKJ at the top to run a herd on it. Someone who will not be bullied by these behemoths who have more money than God.”

Cassidy, who voted to convict President Donald Trump during his second impeachment in 2021, was identified to the Daily Caller in December by an aide as a Republican senator to watch, as he could oppose some of Trump’s cabinet picks. The Louisiana lawmaker, who is up for reelection next year, will be challenged in the primary by Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Topline: The Department of Education has been in the headlines lately as some critics call it a waste of federal funds amid President Donald Trump’s promise to close it down.

But politicians have been sounding the alarm bells for years. In 2010, Sen. Tom Coburn blasted two of the department’s top programs for spending $2.3 billion on “pork barrel” earmarks over 10 years.

That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.

Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname “Dr. No” by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn’t stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.

Coburn’s Wastebook 2010 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth more than $11.5 billion, including $226 million of Department of Education earmarks from fiscal year 2010 — which would be worth $326.2 million today.

Key facts: The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education and the Fund for the Improvement of Education at one point administered nearly every education earmark passed by Congress: 5,563 in a 10-year span.

Coburn published a report of nearly 100 pages detailing some of the most absurd earmarks.

Congress members secured $181 million for schools and programs named after themselves. A $450,000 grant went toward “educational outreach” at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Rep. Robert Andrews sponsored six earmarks worth $3.2 million in total to forgive student loans for graduates of Rutgers Law School, where his wife worked as the assistant dean.

Other earmarks funded college courses about “wine studies,” mariachi music and more.

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Background: The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education still exists today and received $202.3 million in earmarks in 2024.

It’s no longer as easy to track its potentially wasteful spending. As of Jan. 20, clicking on the “earmarks” section of its website returns a “Page Not Found” error.

Summary: Trump has been clear about his desire to cut the Department of Education’s funding, but political leaders of both parties have tried and failed to slow the mass of earmarks flowing in every year.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

Oil is the most important commodity in the world when it comes to human flourishing, and nothing else comes close. Stop and think about how intensely inconvenient and impoverished life would be without the goods and services made possible by oil, along with the remarkable advances in work productivity that never would have happened absent black gold.

Imagine, then, if oil were discovered on such a vast scale that its price plummeted to $5/barrel. Would this devastate the global economy, or the U.S. economy since parts of it are reliant on oil that fetches more than $60/barrel? Quite the opposite. Exactly because oil is such a substantial catalyst for human progress, much cheaper crude would power economic growth in the future that would render the present impoverished by comparison.

It’s something to remember as China-based DeepSeek reports that it can “train” AI devices operating with inferior (think cheaper) chips at costs a great deal lower than American versions. While U.S. models have been developed at costs ranging from $100 million to $1 billion, DeepSeek’s costs per model are in the $5.6 million range. Marc Andreessen was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that “DeepSeek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.” Which should excite everyone reading this write-up, Americans most of all.

As long as our markets remain open to the world’s plenty, what’s produced outside of the U.S. will have the same economic impact as a product or service produced within the U.S. Or more realistically, a much greater economic impact. Lest readers forget, it’s what humans do with AI advances that will really drive progress, not AI itself. Think about it.

The genius of machines that do and think for us will most have to do with the human potential that they unleash. AI that literally erases jobs altogether or substantial aspects of work will free Americans up to specialize on the job in ways previously unimaginable. Think of DeepSeek’s R1 as a low-cost way for bright Americans to much more quickly realize their vast potential.

To which some will respond that it’s essential for Americans to lead the way in all aspects of AI advance precisely because AI is poised to so profoundly power human advance. The viewpoint is backwards.

Especially because of AI’s stated promise, the cheaper it is to access and utilize, the better for all. Think oil once again. The commodity’s importance to progress is unrivaled, which is why the cheaper the oil the better. Look back to the 1980s and 1990s and the U.S. economy if you’re scratching your head.

The rest of the world largely supplied the oil consumed stateside, but not at the expense of growth. In fact, the U.S. economy soared as Americans outsourced the extraction of a crucial commodity to others, all so that they could focus on advances well beyond the ability of others around the world to achieve. In other words, cheap oil imports helped ignite a U.S. technology boom that continues to this day.

The imports didn’t harm us simply because work divided is never harmful. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s a reminder that comparative advantage is not situationally good. It’s always good. In truth, it’s always brilliant.

The rise of DeepSeek and other globally produced AI advances have the potential to author a Golden Age of American economic creativity as outsourced automation of work and thought enable heretofore unseen human advance. And in tying the economies of China and the U.S. even closer together, they’ll be a catalyst for peace too.

Kaya Netherland was five months pregnant when she was shot five times by her estranged husband. While she survived, her baby tragically did not. Now, the man is charged with attempted murder and feticide.

Police say Jeremy McBride plotted Netherland’s death, planning to kill her and her preborn baby, and then kill himself. McBride allegedly confessed to the crime after he was apprehended by police less than one hour after the shooting. He was not at the residence when police arrived, and law enforcement located him through the use of license plate readers.

Netherland’s neighbor found McBride standing over Netherland as she was bleeding on the ground. She had been shot five times in the back and was rushed to the hospital, where it was discovered she was 20 weeks pregnant. She survived, but her baby did not. It is unclear, based on news reports, as to whether it was McBride or the neighbor who called 911.

The Root noted that “In several handwritten notes recovered by police, McBride is said to have expressed his frustrations with his wife’s alleged infidelity and suspicions of her unborn child not belonging to him.”

Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears said that though the couple was estranged, they had not yet officially divorced. “Certainly what is alleged is this person went to great lengths to carry out what he intended to do,” Mears said.

Indiana allows the crime of feticide to be prosecuted if the person knew their actions would intentionally kill the preborn baby; Mears said McBride repeatedly admitted to wanting the baby to die.

“The person [in] this case made admissions about what his exact intentions were going to be and he was aware about her pregnancy and that was [a] motivating factor to take the steps he decided to take,” he said. “You don’t usually have an individual who is that honest with law enforcement about how did all of this occur.”

Netherland’s family said she viewed her preborn child as a miracle, after having experienced multiple miscarriages.

“She was 5 months pregnant with her miracle baby, after several failed pregnancies in the past, and she has lost her baby due to this outrageous crime committed against her. She is alive, and not paralyzed, thank God, but she has already undergone several surgeries including the removal of her left ovary, left fallopian tube, part of her small intestine, and part of her colon, and some repairs have been made to her uterus,” her family said on her GoFundMe page.

McBride reportedly also wrote in a note found by police, “Maybe she will come back one day, but not for me. But in many ways, I killed her.”

Netherland is currently in stable condition.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]

Indiana Governor Mike Braun signed an executive order last week, calling on the state’s Department of Health to “enforce the law” and resume the release of abortion reports. According to the Indy Star, the order, which calls for the “faithful execution of Indiana’s abortion laws,” reverses the practice of former Governor Eric Holcomb, who withheld the reports over privacy concerns.

Indiana protects preborn children from abortion in nearly all instances, with exceptions for a life-limiting prenatal diagnosis, for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, or if the mother’s health or life is in danger. However, induced abortion — the act of intentionally killing a preborn child — is not necessary in any of these instances.

Under Holcomb’s administration, the Department of Health had curtailed its release of abortion reports after the pro-life law went into effect — because officials believed that with so few abortions occurring, the reports would be incriminating to the few women who had abortions. This led a state pro-life group to file a lawsuit. Voices for Life argued that without access to the records, “there is no effective way to enforce our pro-life law.” Voices for Life was backed by Attorney General Todd Rokita, who issued an advisory opinion stating the records should be released. A trial judge later dismissed the lawsuit, and the case is now being appealed.

“All I’m trying to do is just make sure that our laws are enforced according to what the Legislature put out there,” Braun said, noting of the lawsuit, “So, on the technicality of how that works out, I’m going to let the attorney general pursue what he’s doing. I’m interested in just making sure that we enforce the law.”

Indiana Right to Life President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Fichter praised Braun’s order, saying, “Governor Braun’s action today ensures Indiana’s abortion law will be enforced under his administration. In directing the Indiana Department of Health to ensure compliance with pro-life laws, including reporting laws, abortion providers are on notice that there is no tolerance in Indiana for illegal abortions, or acts leading to the injury or deaths of women. We are thankful for Governor Braun’s swift and decisive move in support of Indiana’s law that has ended 98% of abortions in our state.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]

Topline: Even before wildfires began destroying homes in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, the city’s fire department was aware that recent budget cuts could hurt its emergency response.

Meanwhile, the city’s top firefighters and other public servants were getting large taxpayer-funded salaries, mostly on the back of seemingly limitless overtime earnings.

Ten Los Angeles employees earned more than $600,000 in 2023, all the way up to $857,458, auditors at OpenTheBooks.com revealed in a new report.

Key facts: Fire Captain Jason Getchius was the highest-paid firefighter and second-highest paid city employee — after Department of Water and Power employee, Mark Chambers, who took home $857,458.

Getchius earned $801,389 in 2023, including $613,931 in overtime alone. It was the second consecutive year his overtime pay exceeded $500,000.

Battalion Chief Nicholas Ferrari was the second highest OT earner in the city, with $222,405 base pay, $456,260 in overtime, and another $12,674 for a total of $691,340.

Firefighter and paramedic Charles Boswell is the third highest OT earner in the fire department, taking home $167,431 in base pay, $381,489 in OT, and $2,016 in other pay, for $550,966.

Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, who used department resources to establish the LAFD’s first-ever Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Bureau, made $439,772.

Mayor Karen Bass took home $300,154, making her the second-highest paid mayor in the U.S. after San Francisco.

Firefighters make an unreasonable amount in overtime but so do Department of Water and Power employees.

Eight of the top 10 paid Los Angeles employees work at the city’s Department of Water and Power, and pay is only going up. The department’s new CEO Janisse Quinones was hired last May with a salary of $750,000. Her predecessor made $435,000.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom makes $221,743. Los Angeles had 143 workers who made more in overtime alone in 2023, OpenTheBooks previously reported.

Background: Los Angeles’ fire department budget has come under scrutiny for obvious reasons. Mayor Karen Bass cut the department’s budget by $17.5 million last summer, a scaling back of operations that made way for employee raises, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The city is currently employing prison inmates to help control the fires, ABC News and others reported. They are paid $26.90 for a 24-hour shift.

Summary: Emergency preparedness should always take precedence over funding large salaries for public servants.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

The clash couldn’t have been scripted any better.

The occasion was Vice President J.D. Vance’s first interview since taking office, a sit-down with Margaret Brennan of CBS News. The anchor pressed him on the White House pause of refugee resettlement operations, reminding Vance of his past support for admitting into the country those who were “properly vetted.” The vice president replied that the efficacy of the entire screening process was in doubt, pointing to an Afghan national recently arrested for plotting a terror attack in Oklahoma as an example.

The subsequent crescendo launched a thousand memes and highlight reels on the right that one giddy conservative pundit compared to the coverage Michael Jordan got on ESPN during his prime.

“It wasn’t clear if he was radicalized when he got here,” Brennan started to say of the terror suspect who came to the United States after the Afghanistan withdrawal and several rounds of vetting. “I don’t really care, Margaret,” interrupted Vance. This was the mic drop moment the White House wanted.

He was sworn in earlier last week, but during the CBS News interview, if Vance hadn’t already, the vice president cemented himself within MAGA hearts. A cult of personality is now emerging around President Trump’s ascendant Hillbilly Apprentice.

Conservative columnist Salena Zito likened the exchange with Brennan to Rhett Butler’s famous line from “Gone With the Wind,” explaining that it gave “‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ vibes.” The conservative corners of the internet agreed and shared the exchange far and wide. “At what point,” asked a gleeful Donald Trump Jr, “will these leftwing media hacks figure out that they’re no match for JD?” The interview attracted more than 1.3 million views on YouTube, where it was number one on trending the next day.

This was the kind of rollout that the Trump campaign imagined when the president picked him last summer, making him the heir-apparent of the MAGA movement overnight. Vance, then the junior senator from Ohio, had barely been in office for 18 months. He didn’t appeal to constituencies that Trump didn’t already have. Out of the gate, Democrats launched a campaign to label him “weird,” his favorability numbers went negative, and the press had a field day amplifying private comments rather than his public arguments. In private, some Republicans were left with buyer’s remorse.

At the time, Charlie Kirk did not make much of the congealing conventional wisdom. The political activist endorsed Vance first for Senate, then lobbied Trump to make him his running mate. “Many people didn’t understand why,” Kirk told RealClearPolitics, “but they’re seeing it very clearly now.”

A confidant of the first family, Kirk calls Vance “the most powerful weapon” conservatives have in defending Trump’s mandate: “He is smarter than them. He’s more likable than them. And he will not back down to their smug, coastal elitist tone.”

Another exchange between Vance and Brennan, this one on birthright citizenship, had Republicans applauding. He said that no other country has the practice. She countered that America is “a unique country” and one “founded by immigrants.”

Replied the vice president, “This is a very unique country, and it was founded by some immigrants and some settlers,” Vance responded. “But just because we were founded by immigrants doesn’t mean that, 240 years later, that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.”

Watching from home, Rep. Chip Roy cheered how Vance reframed the question and identified modern immigration as “a very different construct.” The two worked closely in Congress, and while Roy has at times found himself crossways with Trump, the Texas Republican was a public and early advocate of Vance as the number two on the ticket. Going forward, he expects Vance to be front and center.

“When you’ve got someone with that much horsepower,” Roy told RCP, “you want to use it. You want them to take it for a spin.”

Vance will likely reprise the role of attack dog, but conservative economist and longtime friend of the new vice president, Oren Cass, cautioned that “it is so much more sophisticated.” Vance didn’t climb the traditional ladder in politics, Cass told RCP. Instead, “he was a founding member of the intellectual movement to build the new right.” It is true the vice president, like his boss, loves the tariff and the union, loathes the corporate tax cut and the global corporation, and is very “anti-woke.”

He served as a vanguard of the New Right, a codification of a Trumpism defined by its rejection of libertarian economics and a rejection of neoconservative policy. This produced in Vance “a depth of understanding,” Cass said, as opposed to the “typical politician” in the Trump era who is “good at learning the talking points really well.”

But even the most talented politicians can languish as understudies when thrust into a job without a clearly delineated policy mandate. Former Vice President Mike Pence faithfully executed the role only to be excommunicated by his old boss. Former Vice President Kamala Harris was left on a policy island until she was summoned to replace her boss in a doomed bid to keep the White House under Democratic control. Cass sees a brighter future for Vance, specifically “at the center of the Venn diagram of all the different elements of the Trump coalition.”

He comes from a blue-collar background but worked in Silicon Valley. He is a millennial but harkens back to the economic nationalism of the 20th century. One thing all those disparate groups agree on: the need to re-industrialize.

This also makes Vance very different than the conservative old guard. When asked during his CBS News interview about criticism of Tulsi Gabbard from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and National Review, for instance, the vice president defended the nominee by saying the president, not publications that have “lost relevance,” ought to determine who serves as his director of national intelligence.

Everyday voters outside the conservative ecosystem are much less interested in those internecine ideological conflicts. They are more likely to identify with a vice president still awestruck by his new position. With shaky camera work, Speaker Mike Johnson captured the moment Vance walked into the Oval Office for the first time. And the man a heartbeat away from the presidency has developed a sort of parasocial presence with voters, giving followers less than choreographed insights into his day job.

When called on to cast the tie-breaking vote for Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth, Vance wrote on social media, “I thought I was done voting in the Senate.” After moving into the vice president’s official residence earlier last week, he wrote a thank you note. “While we don’t own this property, it is a beautiful home for our three little kids,” Vance said on X, adding that his family was “grateful and will take good care of it.” And when an Episcopal bishop pled with the new administration to soften its stance on immigration, Vance was caught on camera at the National Cathedral with an incredulous smirk. His fans likened it to the expression of Jim Halpert, a character from the comedy, “The Office.”

The right was tickled pink by all of it, but Kevin Roberts emphasized the ability of the vice president to break through politics and into the cultural zeitgeist. “His sense of humor, the fact that he’s intentionally a smart ass sometimes,” said Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a longtime friend of Vance, “meets the moment because he says with so few words, sometimes with no words just his facial expression, what we’re all thinking.”

The job is still new. Controversy will inevitably follow. But the early reviews are positive on the right, Roberts said, noting the many “obvious contrasts” in age, style, and demeanor between Vance and Trump, differences which he described as “complementary contrasts.” Added Roberts, “The real crux of this, the real reason for Vance’s success thus far, is he’s not trying to make it about himself.”

Alumni of the first Trump administration had to learn that lesson on the fly. Some flew too close to the sun, like former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who courted the press at every turn, obscuring the president and thus sealing his own fate.

“I’m not sure if anybody can ever outshine Trump,” said a former senior White House official looking back, “but that is the challenge.” Looking back at the first four years of Trump, the official cautioned that so long as the vice president is pushing Trump’s agenda and promoting Trump’s administration, there would be no trouble.

“As long as you do not ever cross that line into what you are doing,” the source added, “then you’re fine.”

This playbook is easier said than done, of course, and easier to follow when the president is not in his final term. Conversations about the next election are premature one week after Inauguration Day. But the subtext of being the MAGA heir-apparent is succession, and the former official noted that if Vance has his own White House ambitions, he doesn’t have the same four-to-six-year runway that other vice presidents normally enjoy: “He only has two years to get ready.”

(UKRINFORM) — Ukraine has received military aid from the United States worth more than $70 billion, but claims that U.S. support has amounted to $100–200 billion are inaccurate, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

He stated this in an interview with the Associated Press, according to Ukrinform.

BREAKING: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy says Ukraine only received around $75 billion of the $177 billion in aid sent by the United States.

“I don’t know where all this money is.”

Where did $100 billion go? pic.twitter.com/Jf5QgCMBFm

— WorldNetDaily (@worldnetdaily) February 2, 2025

“As the president of a country at war, I can say that we have received more than $75 billion [in U.S. aid]. But the claims that Ukraine has received $100 billion out of the $177 billion total, or even $200 billion, as some say, are simply not true. This is important because we are talking about specifics — we did not receive this aid in cash but in weapons. The total value of the weapons we received is just over $70 billion,” Zelensky said.

Beautiful little babies born without arms, or without legs, or suffering other extreme deformities. I still remember, as a young boy, paging through the latest issue of Life magazine and seeing all these shocking and heart-breaking photos. An estimated 10,000 children had been born with such severe deformities in a short period of time, most of them in Europe, though a small number in the U.S.

Introduced as a sedative to help pregnant women with morning sickness, anxiety or sleeplessness, thalidomide has long been regarded as the cause of one of the greatest medical scandals in world history.

That was 1962. Two years later, in 1964, the surgeon general of the United States revealed with maximum publicity that smoking tobacco – at the time widespread, heavily advertised and glorified throughout the culture – causes cancer. Oops.

Fast forward to today, in a time of much greater scientific and medical knowledge, experience and supposedly far stricter drug-testing requirements … and everything is worse.

How can that possibly be?

A brief overview of Americans’ alarmingly declining health demonstrates conclusively that “Make America Healthy Again,” the new Trump administration agenda inspired and led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., couldn’t be more vital – indeed, crucial. Consider:

* The U.S. is in the grip of a full-blown obesity epidemic, with well over 200 million Americans – including millions of children – being overweight or obese. According to the CDC, over 40% of adults in the United States are clinically obese – a serious medical condition – in stark contrast with the 1950s, when approximately 10% of U.S. adults were obese.

* The number of American children and adults with autism spectrum disorders has exploded, rising by 175% over just the last decade. One out of every 36 children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with autism, up from 1 in 44 as recently as 2021. In contrast, during the 1950s, autism was virtually nonexistent, afflicting between 0.01% and 0.05% of Americans born during that decade.

* Early-onset cancer cases rose almost 80% over the last three decades and show no signs of slowing down. One major 2022 study reveals the incidence of early-onset cancers – including breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver and pancreas – has been dramatically increasing since around 1990.

* A staggering 38 million Americans are suffering from diabetes, a number expected to increase to almost 55 million in the next five years. During the late 1950s, the prevalence of diabetes in the U.S. was estimated to be 9 cases per 1,000 people, for a total of 1 million cases.

What’s going on? Why is the health of Americans degrading so radically? With the rapid growth of knowledge and technology, including medical technology, one might expect the exact opposite to be the case – that everyone’s health would be ever improving.

Yet Americans are becoming less and less healthy, including, tragically, the nation’s children. Statistics vary, but as many as half of America’s children are dealing with some sort of chronic health issue, up from less than 1% five decades ago.

Obviously, with Americans’ health in crisis, the goal to “Make America Healthy Again” is welcome and necessary. But there’s one major obstacle to achieving this goal that needs to be addressed up front.

They all lied

As deadly and traumatizing as the COVID-19 pandemic was, it did bring about a mass awakening in at least one important area: Americans discovered they absolutely could not trust the government agencies tasked with safeguarding their health. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to the Food and Drug Administration, to the National Institutes of Health and other branches of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, they all lied to Americans, either explicitly or by willful suppression of the truth.

Most visible, of course – and setting the standard for all other government bureaucrats – was Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under the NIH. Fauci acted the part of the kindly, grandfatherly presidential adviser on all things COVID. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a classic sociopath, smiling while lying about virtually everything – from mask-wearing (he initially admitted the truth, that masks are ineffective, only later doing a full 180 and insisting on universal masking, even outdoors!) to imposing the “six-foot rule” (later admitting this arbitrary rule was based on exactly zero science), to perversely denying that natural immunity provided ideal protection against COVID-19 just as it does for other viruses – a pivotal and unconscionable lie that flung open the doors to ruthless vaccine mandates.

Some of Fauci’s lies were not only dangerous, but jaw-droppingly corrupt – like his insistence that COVID-19 arose spontaneously from an open-air food market in Wuhan, China, rather than from the level-4 biohazard research facility just a few blocks up the street (the Wuhan Institute of Virology) where ongoing mad-scientist “gain-of-function research” – funded by the NIH at Fauci’s direction – was focused on rendering bat coronaviruses more dangerous and more transmissible to humans.

Meanwhile, the CDC and FDA perversely denigrated and mocked the use of ivermectin, a Nobel Prize-honored drug that had saved literally millions of lives from various other deadly infectious diseases, as documented in the peer-reviewed “Journal of Antibiotics.” Yet despite multiple studies proving ivermectin to be an effective and life-saving early treatment for COVID-19, it was ridiculed mercilessly by the federal health bureaucracies and their news media “echo chamber.” Similar story with hydroxychloroquine.

Why did they all lie, mocking and discouraging Americans from taking advantage of these drugs, whose safety was long-acknowledged by the FDA, and which could have saved many more lives and enormously reduced suffering during the COVID pandemic?

That’s easy: They maniacally wanted every man, woman and child in America to take “the jab” – that is, the various experimental mRNA COVID-19 shots that turned out to be some of the most problem-ridden vaccines in medical history.

Clearly, the medical bureaucracies within Big Government have not been worthy of Americans’ trust. Nor has Big Pharma, which has proven itself to be far more motivated by gargantuan profits than safeguarding human lives.

Fortunately, figuring out what’s destroying Americans’ health and reducing or eliminating the causes doesn’t require the cooperation of bloated, power-obsessed government bureaucracies, nor of giant profit-obsessed mega-businesses.

It’s not that complicated. In fact, the fundamentals couldn’t be more obvious.

‘Mass poisoned by Big Pharma and Big Food’

As noted earlier, until the early 1960s, millions of Americans smoked tobacco with no awareness of its serious health consequences. It was cool, sophisticated and relaxing. Indeed, even medical doctors and surgeons were frequently depicted in the movies as smoking cigarettes, perhaps to add character and drama to their portrayal.

Then, suddenly Americans learned that smoking tobacco causes cancer. On Jan. 11, 1964, the federal government released “Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service.” Ever since, cigarette packages are required by law to include this or a similar warning: “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.”

Today, America is basically where it was before the surgeon general’s warning about tobacco – but now it’s with regard to many of the food and drug products hundreds of millions consume daily.

Strangely, even though the food everyone consumes literally becomes the very substance of their bodies, most people somehow assume that what they eat has little or no effect on their health and wellbeing. This represents a monumental rejection of reality that “Make America Healthy Again” hopes to remedy.

In reality, insists RFK Jr., Americans are being “mass poisoned by Big Pharma and Big Food.” He claims the federal agencies tasked with looking out for the public’s interest not only have failed to stop the poisoning, but have enabled it. The result, he says, is an unprecedented and worsening epidemic of chronic disease in the U.S.

Thus, three days before the Nov. 5, 2024 election, Kennedy announced that Donald Trump “asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic in this country. And he said, ‘I want to see results, measurable results in the diminishment of chronic disease within two years.’ And I said, Mr. President, I will do that.”

To say that Kennedy is not a fan of the processed, sweetened and chemicalized “foods” that tens of millions of Americans consume daily is an understatement. He often ridicules “Big Food” products like McDonald’s French fries and highly sweetened and artificially colored breakfast cereals like Cap’n Crunch and Fruit Loops as food products sold in the U.S. that include ingredients banned in other countries.

“It’s easy to fix,” he said a week before November’s election. “We have a thousand ingredients in our foods that are illegal in Italy and other countries in Europe.” And Donald Trump, adds Kennedy, agrees with his plans to “get the chemicals out” of the foods Americans are eating.

Then there is the strange obsession with vaccines – all vaccines, regardless of their safety, effectiveness or appropriateness – which now constitutes something of a quasi-religion in America. For example, parents of all newborn children are pressured to give their one-day-old baby a vaccine shot to protect them from contracting a disease (Hepatitis B) that can be transmitted only by having sex or using an infected drug-user’s hypodermic needle. Yet, if you question the wisdom or timing of this, you are denounced as an “anti-vaxxer!” RFK Jr. is justified in trying to bring some common sense and science into the hysteria that many – generally on the political and cultural left – have over vaccines.

Regarding the decades-old vaccine-autism issue, ridiculed endlessly by the media and Big Pharma, Kennedy says vaccines are not “the only cause of autism,” but explains: “Our kids today are swimming around in a toxic soup coming mainly from their foods that operate along the same biological pathways. But some of it’s coming from pharmaceutical drugs.”

Far from being “anti-vaccine,” Kennedy says he just seeks to “restore the transparency” surrounding vaccines. And Trump has promised to finally get to the bottom of the supposed vaccine-autism link.

Yet another big issue is that of pesticides and herbicides like Roundup commonly used by farmers, also a concern of Kennedy’s. Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, has been classified by some major organizations, including the International Agency for Research on Cancer, as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Indeed, some people have filed lawsuits against Bayer AG, the pharma company that acquired pesticide-maker Monsanto, alleging Roundup caused their cancer. This obviously deserves scrutiny, especially since glyphosate is found in far more food products than most Americans would imagine. This is one of the main reasons, in turn, that more Americans than ever are choosing to serve their families organically grown foods.

So there is hope. Even before Donald Trump’s inauguration – perhaps seeing the writing on the wall pursuant to the new “Make America Healthy Again” mission – the FDA at long last officially banned the common food dye known as “Red 3” from all food products, due to its long-known cancer risk.

As FDA Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods Jim Jones explained, “Evidence shows cancer in laboratory male rats exposed to high levels of FD&C Red No. 3.” The synthetic dye, made from petroleum, gives food products like children’s cereals and candies a “bright cherry-red color,” the FDA acknowledged.

Currently, almost 3,000 foods Americans are eating are known to contain Red No. 3.

(Note: Although “Red 3,” or Erythrosine, is now officially banned from all foods, dietary supplements and medicines, food manufacturers have until January 2027, and drug manufacturers until January 2028, to actually get the red out.)

Ironically, the exact same red dye was banned from cosmetics nearly 35 years ago due to the same risk – cancer. Dr. Peter Lurie, director of the group Center for Science in the Public Interest, which led the petition effort to ban the dye, said: “This is a welcome, but long overdue, action from the FDA: removing the unsustainable double standard in which Red 3 was banned from lipstick but permitted in candy.”

You are what you eat

Finally, a 35,000-foot view: When considering the specter of massive numbers of people suffering grievously from eating the wrong foods and/or putting dangerous substances into their bodies – all because some entity, pretending to care about them but harboring a hidden agenda, persuaded them to do so – it may be edifying to reflect on the obvious spiritual/biblical parallels.

According to the Book of Genesis, the downfall and corruption of the first man and woman, a lasting consequence inherited by all of their progeny, down to the present day, centered around their having been seduced – by an entity pretending to care about them but harboring a hidden agenda – into eating the wrong food, in defiance of God’s specific command.

Likewise, as is proclaimed boldly throughout the New Testament, every person’s redemption, healing, salvation and eternal happiness has something to do – in a mystical and spiritual, yet very real way – with partaking of the right heavenly “food,” the body and blood of Jesus Christ, Who frequently referred to Himself as the “bread of life” and Who offers “living water.” This is reinforced and re-experienced every time a Christian believer participates in communion.

Of course, the earthly food we eat every day does not save our souls. Yet it seems, at least to the Creator of the universe and of mankind, that there is something about making the right eating choices that can be pretty important to our wellbeing.

All of which is just to say that our choices as to the food we eat, and whatever other substances we put into our bodies, are truly consequential. Our bodies are temples of the living God, according to Scripture. So let us not defile ourselves with substances that are contaminated, adulterated, corrupted or forbidden … no matter how appealing they may be.

As Adam might well have said after the Fall: Trust me, it’s not worth it.

The preceding is adapted from David Kupelian’s cover story in the February 2025 issue of Whistleblower Special Report, titled “MAKING AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN! How Big Government, Big Pharma and Big Food are making Americans overweight, addicted and chronically ill,” and available in both a print and digital edition.