With a slim majority and a number of members representing districts carried by Joe Biden, it’s doubtful that the GOP has the votes to impeach Biden. Trump doesn’t care, the point is to announce the investigation.

The House Republicans will hold their first impeachment hearing for Joe Biden next week, a non-event that even backers admit will present no new evidence.

The extreme rightwing of the GOP caucus is in open rebellion against Speaker Kevin McCarthy. So, as a sop to the insurgents, McCarthy agreed to allow impeachment hearings. However, McCarthy had to use a procedural trick because he would have lost a vote on the issue.

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Even the most vocal proponents of impeaching Joe Biden admit that there’s no evidence that he was involved in any of his son’s influence-peddling schemes. Given that the Republicans have been investigating Hunter Biden’s messy business dealings and turbulent personal life for years, it seems unlikely that the extra subpoena power that impeachment proceedings allow is going to generate any new leads.

After the mind-wipe of the pandemic and the betrayal of January 6, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump was first impeached for trying to strong-arm Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s time on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified that Trump didn’t care whether the investigation actually happened. All he wanted was the announcement of an investigation ahead of the election. “He had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it,” Sondland explained during Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump’s goal was to tarnish Biden before the election. Now, Trump’s threatening House Republicans with immediate primary challenges if they don’t vote to impeach the president. With a slim majority and a number of members representing districts carried by Joe Biden, it’s doubtful that the GOP has the votes to impeach Biden. Trump doesn’t care, the point is to announce the investigation.

The repeatedly debunked allegation is that as vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who was looking into corruption at Burisma. Biden did indeed push for Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to step aside. Trump and his allies alleged that Biden was freelancing to benefit his son. In fact, pushing the prosecutor to step down was official US policy. Far from shaping US policy to benefit his son, Biden was executing the Obama administration’s anti-corruption agenda. Furthermore, the Shokin inquiry had already been shelved by the time Biden tried to force him out and its scope never extended to Hunter’s time on the board anyway.

The Republicans have tried to keep the furor alive by hyping the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Vish Burra, a Republican operative from New York, bragged that he spent nearly two months holed up in a hotel room with Steve Bannon trying to create “an October Surprise” with the data from Biden’s laptop. Burra said they called their effort “the Manhattan Project because we were essentially creating a nuclear political weapon.”

The October Surprise largely flopped because the mainstream media and social media giants recognized the laptop dump for what it was – a transparent attempt by the Republicans to manipulate the election with a fake scandal, just as Trump had tried to do in Ukraine.

Operatives like Burra and Bannon have done their best to spin conspiracy theories about Biden’s involvement in Ukrainian biolabs, Chinese intrigues and imaginary sex-trafficking schemes. But none of these allegations have gained traction outside the Republican fever swamps, most likely because Hunter Biden was a sad dude who dined out on his family name like countless Washington failsons, but who didn’t actually convince his father to intervene on behalf of his clients. As Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer put it, Hunter sold “the illusion of access.”

By opening impeachment hearings with zero evidence of wrongdoing by president Biden, the GOP is running a tired Trumpian play. It doesn’t matter whether an investigation uncovers anything, all that matters is that the investigation be announced.

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The bullsh*t artist known as Elon Musk is blaming Jews for the implosion of X (perpetually known as Twitter, because “X” is simply too ridiculous).

Specifically, Musk is blaming the storied Anti-Defamation League for driving advertisers away from the social media platform by complaining about all the defamation that goes on there.

Musk tweeted that the site’s revenue had dropped by 60 percent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!”

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Keep in mind that Musk is a ketamine-addled manchild who lies constantly. The ADL has no power to force advertisers to stop advertising on Twitter. All it can do is spread the word about the hateful speech that’s rampant on the platform. Blaming/crediting the ADL with a 60 percent drop in revenues is absurd, but it wouldn’t surprise me if ADL’s warnings were getting traction with advertisers. Most companies don’t want their products displayed next to the musings of @gasthejews6969. It’s bad for business.

Musk’s tantrum will probably never see the inside of a courtroom. For one thing, he’s broke. Musk can’t even pay the rent on Twitter headquarters. Furthermore, Musk threatens to sue people all the time and usually doesn’t follow through with it. The point of that tweet was pure vice-signaling to the far right. Musk wants to show that he’s a team player.

It’s a mutual admiration society. Musk consistently chats up the worst antisemites on Twitter. In June, Musk was cheerfully bantering in the replies to a tweet about “adrenochrome” and “hating the J’s [Jews].” Adrenochrome is QAnon’s twist on the ancient antisemitic trope of blood libel.

“The ADL’s favourite tactic is financially blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech on their platforms,” tweeted self-proclaimed “raging antisemite” and white nationalist Keith Woods on Aug 31, “Why should they have a platform on X to hold @elonmusk to ransom? It’s time to #BanTheADL.”

READ MORE: 'Edgelord' Musk accused of 'insidious efforts' to ban the Anti-Defamation League from Twitter/X: report

Musk liked the tweet, which launched the hashtag #BanTheADL, and offered to “run a poll” of his subscribers on the question. The hashtag was picked up across the far-right including by Andrew Torba, the founder of the social media platform Gab, who refuses to speak to Jewish reporters, and by “groyper” Nick Fuentes. Fuentes bragged that he and his fellow antisemites now have a “captive audience” in Musk.

When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he reinstated large numbers of accounts that had previously been banned for posting hate. The number of antisemitic slurs on Twitter surged by over 60% in the weeks after Musk took over the platform. At one point, Musk even reinstated neo-Nazi fugitive Andrew Anglin. Anglin became a fugitive because he blew off a multi-million dollar judgment for terrorizing a Montana family.

“Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate told the New York Times at the time, “They have reacted accordingly.”

Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist, but he’s threatening to sue a nonprofit for speaking out against the permissive environment he’s nurtured for hate speech and conspiracy theories. It’s literally the Anti-Defamation League’s job to sound the alarm about hate speech. The League monitors hate speech and shares its conclusions with the public, as it has done since its founding in 1913.

Musk is following the footsteps of generations of conspiracy theorists who have blamed the Anti-Defamation League for fomenting a worldwide conspiracy. The ADL is a stock villain on the far-right along with Bn’ai Brith, the Rothschilds, and the Trilateral Commission. And Elon Musk is here for it. He’s building a mainstream hate platform.

READ MORE: Vivek Ramaswamy will appoint Elon Musk if elected 'because he laid off 75% of the employees at Twitter'

Editor's note: The author of this editorial has been corrected to Lindsay Beyerstein.

Welcome to The Uterus, America’s newest national park, please enjoy your stay and exit through the gift shop. At least, that’s the vision of Judge James Ho of the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ho is part of a three-judge panel that ruled recently to restrict access to long-approved abortion drugs. Ho went even further than his fellow judges, however, arguing that anti-choice doctors could challenge the availability of the drug by arguing that it deprives them of their right to gawk at cute fetus pictures.

“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” Ho went on. “Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

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Ho is borrowing a concept from environmental law known as “aesthetic injury.” Until now, the concept has been used to safeguard tourists’ right to enjoy pristine wilderness areas, but now a federal judge wants to put women on the same level as plants and animals. Sexism doesn’t get more obvious than that: Women’s bodies exist to gratify bystanders who can sue to preserve the view.

“It’s well-established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal,” wrote Judge Ho, who argued that because researchers can sue to curb pesticide use, doctors should be able to sue to the FDA approval of an abortion drug 20 years after the fact.

Ho’s argument is even more breathtaking than a daybreak view of the cervix. If Ho had his way, anyone who planned to leer at pregnant bellies would have a legal basis to sue to protect his aesthetic supply. There’s no reason why aesthetic rights should be limited to doctors rather than, say, pregnancy fetishists on PornHub.

Such trolling in the guise of legal argument is exactly what you’d expect for a judge who was sworn in under the watchful eye of Clarence Thomas’s billionaire bestie Harlan Crow.

READ MORE: How 'MAGA cultists' and 'white evangelical cruelty' are making young American Christians avoid church

Even if the Supreme Court were to uphold such reasoning, it would be a violation of medical ethics for any physician to champion his aesthetic enjoyment over the wellbeing of the patient.

The moral conviction that a physician must never put personal gratification over patient wellbeing is as old as medicine itself. The Hippocratic Oath has largely been superseded by more modern formulations, but the old Greek version contains many principles that still govern medical ethics today. The original oath states that “Whatsoever house I may enter, my visit shall be for the convenience and advantage of the patient.”

In other words, the doctor’s duty is to attend to the wellbeing of the patient not to gratify their own urges, aesthetic or otherwise. This proviso was originally a promise not to have sex with patients, enslaved or free, but the moral imperative of disinterested beneficence has been elaborated and extended to create the principle of patient-centered care that all physicians must strive to uphold today.

READ MORE: White men have controlled women’s reproductive rights throughout American history

"Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially," Dr. Anthony Fauci testified in July 2021.

US Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, had accused Fauci, who was at the time the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, of lying to the Congress about the funding of a gain-of-function (GOF) experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and of “trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world from a pandemic.”

The hearing became a battle between one of the country’s most respected scientists and Rand, a non-practicing eye doctor who created a fake medical board in order to falsely promote himself as “board certified.”

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Clearly, Fauci’s rebuke still stings.

Recently, Rand announced that he had asked the US Attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute Fauci for perjury. Paul tried to interest the Justice Department in perjury prosecution in 2021. That request went nowhere, because challenging Paul’s crackpot theories is not a crime.

Fauci testified that NIH scientists “up and down the chain” determined that the project did not qualify as gain-of- function under the agency’s criteria.

Experts disagree about how gain-of-function should be defined. However, the ostensible purpose of Paul’s line of questioning was to find out if NIH violated its own rules, so the NIH’s definition was the relevant one.

READ MORE: 'Slitting throats' and 'stone-cold dead': DeSantis ramps up violent rhetoric

Paul’s real agenda was to push the conspiracy theory that NIH caused the covid pandemic by funding this particular experiment. This is impossible. Neither the original bat viruses in this experiment nor the end product could possibly have given rise to the virus that causes Covid-19.

Fauci stated in emails that the Wuhan Institute of Virology engaged in gain-of-function research. Paul is now claiming this proves Fauci lied to the Congress. This is a dishonest equivocation by Paul. Fauci testified that the experiment that the NIH helped fund was not GOF. He didn’t testify as to whether there was any GOF going on at the Wuhan Institute.

At the very beginning of the pandemic, some leading virologists entertained the idea that the virus might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute. So they investigated the question and decided that the seemingly mysterious features of the SCV2 virus were found in nature. They published a paper making that case and lab-leak boosters have been trying to concoct some kind of scandal out of the normal operation of the scientific method.

Since the paper’s publication, its conclusions have been supported by a growing body of scientific and intelligence data. The geographical distribution of early fits an emergence from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, not the lab across town. Viruses ever more similar to SCV2 are being found in wild bats.

As the scientific credibility of the lab-leak theory has dwindled, the vitriol of its proponents has increased. Paul isn’t the only rightwinger seeking vengeance on Fauci. “We need to pop him good, and hang a felony on him is what we need to do. People lost their lives because of this nonsense, and they are playin’ God,” said Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert called for Fauci’s prosecution. The head of the Oklahoma Republican Party called for his execution. Last year, a West Virginia man was sentenced to three years for threatening to drive Fauci and his family into the street, beat them to death and set them on fire.

Two years after the confrontation between Fauci and Paul, the evidence for a natural origin for SCV2 continues to accumulate while the lab-leak boosters clutch at straws to keep their cherished theory alive.

READ MORE: 'Clearly defined body count': Florida and Ohio Republicans experienced 43 percent more COVID deaths than Dems

On a sweltering night in 1858, 48-year-old Abraham Lincoln rose to accept the Republican nomination for the Illinois senate race. The future president gave a speech that echoes to this day, as the states square off over abortion rights in a post-Roe world.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln warned, alluding to the notorious Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court decreed that enslaved people remained in bondage even if they were taken to free states, forcing the free states to bend their laws to the will of enslaving states.

“Popular sovereignty” was the buzzword of the day, a supposed compromise in which the white men of each new state got to vote on whether to hold Black people in bondage. It was no compromise at all.

READ MORE: GOP senator blocking 265 military promotions falsely promoted his father’s WWII service: report

As Lincoln spoke, enslavers were flocking to the western territories, getting those territories declared slave states. Free-staters feared that these newly-added slave states would tip the national balance of power in the Senate and the Electoral College and one day enshrine slavery nationwide.

Votes on whether to allow slavery in new states became desperate struggles marked by election fraud and even terrorism. “Popular sovereignty” wasn’t a compromise. It was an accelerant.

“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided,” Lincoln continued, “It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Lincoln hit upon a dynamic that continues to bedevil this country. What happens to a system based on local control when states try to project their powers beyond their borders? Can the walls of our home withstand the pitched battle within?

READ MORE: Nebraska teen sentenced to 90 days in jail after self-managed abortion

Two years after Lincoln’s prophetic address, a new federal Fugitive Slave Law forced free states to cooperate with slave-catchers pursuing slaves who had fled to the North, and empowered federal marshals to assist the slave-catchers on free soil. Some free states passed their own laws barring sheriffs from assisting slave-catchers and county jailers from holding fugitive slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law helped galvanize average Northerners for civil war. Even those who didn’t care about the rights of Black people were alarmed that the slave states were determined to subjugate the free states.

Today, we face a similar conflict over abortion. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it promised that each state would have the right to allow or ban abortion. But red states are already colluding to force their extremist agenda onto blue states where abortion is legal.

Last week, 19 Republican attorneys general demanded that the federal government give them access to the medical records of patients who travel to other states to get legal abortions. Rest assured, the Biden administration is not going to give it to them, but they’ll get what they want if the Republicans retake the White House.

Our federalist system protects the right to travel between states in search of a legal climate congenial to one’s values. Some states allow casino gambling, recreational cannabis, or permitless carry. If you want to do these things, and your state doesn’t allow them, you’re free to go to another state where they’re legal. It would be unconstitutional for Texas to directly criminalize traveling for an abortion. However, these attorneys general are trying to pry loose private medical records of care in states where abortion is legal. The root of the problem are the bounty-hunting laws which give residents the right to sue over abortions, including ones obtained legally out of state.

As during the Fugitive Slave crisis, many blue states have already passed laws of their own preventing cooperation with out-of-state investigators seeking information on legal abortions and many reproductive rights activists are looking to the historical precedent of resistance to the Fugitive Slave law.

Several blue states have started abortion pill pipelines to red states. After Dobbs, they passed laws that guarantee that no doctor will be extradited for delivering medical care that’s legal in their home state. That includes prescribing abortion pills by telemedicine. So, a doctor in New York state can prescribe abortion pills to a woman in Texas. The federal government controls the mail, so as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House, there’s little the red states can do to stop it.

The solicitor general of Texas is warning that authorities in Texas could set up a sting operation and charge a New York doctor with attempted murder for prescribing these drugs. That doctor would be safe from extradition under New York law – assuming that law would survive before the hard-right Supreme Court. What happens if the court were to deny New York’s right to protect legal abortion care on its own soil is anyone’s guess, but if the Court were to deny New York’s right to protect its doctors, the ensuing conflict would shake our house to its very foundations.

READ MORE: Missouri Supreme Court orders Republican state AG to let abortion ballot initiative go forward

A scientific paper now ranks with the grassy knoll in the minds of conspiracy theorists. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” (2020) has become an object of obsession complete with its own rich folklore. Last week, House Republicans devoted a three-hour hearing to haranguing the scientists who wrote it.

Two of the paper’s authors, Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Robert F. Garry, were hauled before the committee to answer for their defiance from GOP orthodoxy.

The GOP party line is that Dr. Anthony Fauci somehow forced a group of university professors to publish a peer-reviewed paper arguing that Covid-19 wasn’t a bioweapon or a laboratory construct. Fauci supposedly wanted to discredit the lab leak because he helped the Wuhan Institute of Virology create the virus. No, really. They get indignant when you call it a conspiracy theory, but that’s the B-movie plot they’re pushing.

READ MORE: Did Trump let Americans die purely for political purposes?

The proximal origin of Proximal Origin was not Fauci’s NIAID lair, but a teleconference organized by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, then the head of a UK research charity. Farrar set the agenda, invited the guests, and even provided tech support. The witnesses testified that Fauci hopped on the call but said little of substance.

Andersen also testified that, far from pressuring him to debunk the lab leak, Fauci had encouraged him to publish any evidence that he might find of a leak and offered to help him share any such evidence with the proper authorities. These are not the actions of someone orchestrating a massive coverup.

In lab leak lore, the researchers’ open-mindedness is evidence of coercion. The subpoenaed emails show that, far from being reflexive leak deniers, the authors of this paper thought they saw features that couldn’t have evolved naturally. If they couldn’t explain how the virus might have arisen in nature, that raised red flags that it might have been engineered. But once they delved into the quirks of SCV2 and explored the weird and wonderful features of wild coronaviruses, their doubts were allayed.

If Fauci was orchestrating a coverup, why would he pick scientists who said they took the lab leak seriously?

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis’ surgeon general 'personally altered' key data on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety: report

Another plank in the GOP conspiracy theory is that Fauci bribed Andersen to argue against the lab leak with a federal research grant. In fact, that grant was awarded before the pandemic started. As is standard for such grants, the award was based on high scores by independent reviewers, not the whims of Tony Fauci.

The majority falsely claimed in its report that the authors sent the paper to Fauci for editing and approval before it was published. In fact, Fauci received a copy of the manuscript that had already been accepted by the journal and didn’t offer any comments.

Most disturbing of all, Republicans tried to spin the scientific method itself as evidence of a conspiracy. They seized on a snippet of an Andersen email stating that he and his colleagues were trying to disprove the lab leak theory. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s science. Experimenters start with a testable hypothesis like, “Sars-CoV-2 leaked from a lab” and then they do their best to knock it down. If they can’t defeat it, the hypothesis survives to be tested again another day. As Andersen explained, they couldn’t definitively disprove a lab leak, but the evidence convinced them it was unlikely.

“My early hypothesis was that of a ‘lab theory’ and when I stated that we were “trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” I was specifically referring to the concept of falsification,” Andersen said in his written remarks.

“This is a text-book example of the scientific method in use.”

READ MORE: 'Ignorance about the biological function': Virologist dispels testimony from GOP’s lab link 'expert'

Scot Peterson is the first cop to be prosecuted for failing to act during a school shooting. The former school resource officer of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school faces a criminal charge for every child and adult who was shot after he arrived outside the building where Nicholas Cruz rampaged. If convicted of all charges, Peterson faces nearly a century in prison – the same as the gunman.

That’s monstrous.

Peterson is a coward, a f*ckup, a liar.

READ MORE: 'Authoritarian' Ron DeSantis’ campaign to 'weaponize state power' hasn’t made Florida any safer: libertarian

But he’s not on par with a mass murderer.

Peterson had a handgun on that horrible Valentine’s Day in 2018, but no body armor and no rifle. The gunman was armed with an AR15 and thousands of rounds. If the 56-year-old glorified mall cop had rushed in alone, he probably would have added his name to the body count.

Peterson is not a sympathetic figure. His nickname was “Rod,” short for “Retired on Duty,” a moniker he earned from his lackadaisical approach to his job. His claim that he hid because he thought that he saw a sniper inside shooting out is preposterous.

That said, Peterson is poised to become a scapegoat – a hapless creature banished to absolve the sins of others, namely the lawmakers who refuse to enact commonsense gun laws, and the judges and justices who refuse to uphold gun laws based on a historically bankrupt reading of the Second Amendment.

READ MORE: Black people in Florida are three times more likely to receive tickets for loud music: analysis

Since the Columbine rampage of the late 1990s, police doctrine has stressed the importance of engaging the shooter immediately. But in the heat of the moment, doctrine amounts to a suggestion. Time and time again, officers fail to engage school shooters. Several other officers from the Parkland area responded to the scene but failed to enter the building. In Uvalde, Texas, an astonishing 376 officers failed to confront the shooter. A report later concluded that the officers put their personal safety above the wellbeing of the victims. The officers knew the shooter had an automatic weapon and they were scared.

“Protect and Serve” is a popular police motto, but it’s purely aspirational. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that police officers typically have no duty to protect citizens. In light of these rulings, the 11th Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the police violated Parkland students’ right to due process by standing by.

Florida prosecutors are trying to sidestep this body of law by prosecuting Peterson under a novel and extremely tenuous legal theory of child neglect. They contend that Deputy Peterson was a caregiver. His failure to intervene was a crime.

In their rush to nail a cowardly school resource officer, prosecutors could end up creating a perverse precedent. In 2019, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis threw open the doors to armed teachers in the classroom. Teachers are definitely caregivers. Would that mean that every pistol-packing teacher is criminally liable if they fail to draw on a school shooter with an AR?

Even if the Florida courts manage to cobble together some novel legal duty to intervene in school shootings, it’s not realistic to expect cops or anyone else to consistently live up to it. Soldiers train intensively and regularly to be able to run toward gunfire. Peterson had completed a few workshops on school shooters, which is laughably feeble preparation to override the instinct for self-preservation. Running toward gunfire to defend the innocent is heroic. But heroism is, by definition, above and beyond what’s required. Making criminals out of ordinary people in impossible situations is grotesque.

The real problem is that most police officers are scared to face down shooters armed with weapons of war. The only solution is gun control.

Everything else is a distraction.

READ MORE: Florida Sheriff slams DeSantis’ permitless carry law in Jon Stewart interview: 'No benefit to the community'

Investors’ demand for stocks of companies touting “Artificial Intelligence” accounts for all the US stock market gains this year. A steady stream of hucksters, whose incomes invariably depend on more venture capital funding for machine learning, are lining up to tell us how the technology is poised to reshape everything from movies to medicine to romance. But "artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. Services like ChatGPT are not intelligent and describing them as such sets us up to be suckered by tech companies.

“AI is a machine’s ability to perform the cognitive functions we associate with human minds, such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting with an environment, problem solving, and even exercising creativity,” kvells McKinsey and Company, the management firm whose high-paid consultants who have finessed the destruction of whole sectors of the economy and eased the paths of authoritarian regimes worldwide.

This is false. Today’s “AI” doesn’t see or learn or remember in the way that sentient beings do, and it certainly doesn’t use creativity. Neural nets probe huge datasets and find the patterns that we tell them to look for. ChatGPT and its ilk are fancy autocomplete. There’s no insight behind their output. They don’t know what’s true, or even what words mean. Which is why bots like ChatGPT generate polished nonsense backed by manufactured sources.

READ MORE: 'Well, first of all, let me tell you': AI perfectly answers CNN questions like Donald Trump

Today’s machine learning tech isn’t much smarter than the “cybernetic tortoises” and “hardware mice” of the mid-20th century. The quest for machine intelligence goes back to the 1950s. The AI industry has gone through repeated hype-disappointment-shame cycles since that time. You don’t need a neural net to see this pattern: a new advance offers marginal improvements, which are shamelessly oversold, consumers are disappointed, and anticipation is replaced by a sense of betrayal. Whereupon “AI” becomes a dirty word for the next decade, only for the cycle to repeat, thanks to new discoveries and short memories. The cycle is so predictable that researchers coined the term “AI Winter” to describe the alienation and embitterment phase of the cycle.

The more tech CEOs talk up the brilliance of their algorithms, the more predisposed we are to regard whatever they churn out as smart. The so-called Barnum Effect that keeps fortune tellers in business may account for our willingness to perceive the generic outputs of machines as intelligent. When you tell people that a paragraph of generic platitudes comes from a personalized astrological reading, recipients will marvel at the precision and insight of the pronouncements. In truth, we ascribe our own meanings to vague statements, but we ascribe the sense-making to the imaginary agent, be it the amazing Zoltan or ChatGPT.

Tech CEOs want to give the algorithms all the credit, but their apparent brilliance is actually piggy-backing on the acumen of countless low-wage workers. The startup behind ChatGPT relies on an army of low-paid human contractors to label the data they use to train the system.

Maybe one day we'll have true machine minds, but we're nowhere near that yet. And priming people to expect intelligence is setting them up to vastly overrate what the current tech is capable of--in ways that can be dangerous.

READ MORE: What happens when LTAI (Less Than Artificial Intelligence) gives way to AI?

If you're a boss, replacing your copywriter with "artificial intelligence" sounds a lot better than entrusting your brand to a neural network that literally has no idea what it's spitting out.

The CEO of Emirate airlines predicted that pilots might one day be replaced by machines. It sounds a lot better to say you want “artificial intelligence” to land the plane than that you’re prepared to let autocomplete take the wheel.

Maybe one day we'll have true machine minds, but we're nowhere near that yet. And priming people to expect intelligence is setting them up to vastly overrate what the current tech is capable of--in ways that can be dangerous. Companies like McKinsey are salivating at the prospect of teaching companies how to lay off humans and replace them with algorithms.

Seventy years on, "artificial intelligence" is just a marketing buzzword and you're doing the tech companies’ promotions for them when you use it uncritically.

READ MORE: 'I’m worried': Harvard professor explains why AI technology could imperil democracy in the future

The former leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, was convicted alongside three of his lieutenants last week of seditious conspiracy and a slew of other offenses.

The jury concluded that the Proud Boys, a notorious fighting/drinking club calling itself “Trump’s Army,” plotted to obstruct the joint session of Congress on January 6. They sought to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory and reinstall Donald Trump as president.

So far, over a dozen high-level Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been convicted or plead guilty to charges of seditious conspiracy for their roles on J6. Seditious conspiracy is the most serious of all charges stemming from the J6 insurrection and as well as the hardest to prove. These verdicts are a major victory for the Justice Department, but they also increase the pressure on special prosecutor Jack Smith to charge the conspirator in chief, Donald Trump.

Enrique Tarrio’s defense at trial was that he was just following orders from Trump.

“It was Donald Trump’s words. It was his motivation. It was his anger that caused what occurred on January 6th in your beautiful and amazing city,” Tarrio’s lawyer said in his closing statement, “It was not Enrique Tarrio. They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald J. Trump and those in power.”

Tarrio was no mere scapegoat, but that lawyer has a point. Donald Trump was the unindicted co-conspirator in that courtroom.

We already know a lot about how Trump gathered his supporters in Washington, wound them up with a conspiracy theory-laden tirade, and pointed them in the direction of the Capitol.

Enticing the faithful to DC was a drawn-out process. Trump put the Proud Boys on notice in 2020 when he told the drinking/brawling society to “stand back and stand by” for violence connected to the election.

Then Trump summoned his supporters to Washington for what he called a “wild protest” on January 6. Having assembled the crowd at the Ellipse on the appointed day, Trump riled up the crowd with fanciful tales of election fraud and set them loose on the joint session of Congress, which had convened to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, fleshed out many key details in her testimony before the January 6 committee.

Hutchinson explained that Trump not only set the mob on the Capitol, he intended to lead them himself. The former president knew what was going to happen: The mob was going to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and he wanted to lead them.

Not only that, Trump knew that many in the crowd were carrying guns. In the run up to J6, Hutchinson remembered hearing the words “Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” being bandied about. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows also spoke with dirty trickster Roger Stone and QAnon luminary Michael Flynn on January 5 “regarding what would play out the next day.”

The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have ties to Stone, Trump’s oldest political confidante. He gave the Proud Boys a national profile during Trump’s presidency. The Proud Boys served as his personal guard and his social media consultants. At one point, the Proud Boys were so close to Stone they controlled his phone and posted to social media on his behalf.

Tarrio and the other Proud Boys richly deserve the lengthy prison sentences they’re probably going to face at their sentencing later this month.

Donald Trump, the man who orchestrated the insurrection, should face the same fate.

In the best-case scenario, Discord leaker Jack Teixeira is a conspiracy theorist who pillaged the nation’s secrets in a bid to confirm his paranoid antigovernment hunches.

Either that, or he was one bad breakup away from becoming a mass shooter.

Regardless, Teixeira remains a perfect mascot for Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and her allies on the far right.

READ MORE: Revealed: Leaker Jack Teixeira had more documents than originally thought and for a lot longer

"Jake Teixeira is white, male, Christian and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime," the Republican insurrectionist and notorious conspiracy theorist tweeted after Teixeira was arrested on suspicion of violating the Espionage Act.

Back when he still had a job at Fox News, Tucker Carlson painted Teixeira as a noble whistleblower exposing the crimes of the Washington establishment, despite the fact that Teixeira had no intention of publicizing the documents outside his small circle of newly post-pubescent Discord bros.

In its April 26 motion for pretrial detention, the government noted that Teixiera searched a classified database for keywords linked to mass shootings such as “Uvalde” and “Mandalay Bay” as well as for conspiracy topics like “Ruby Ridge.”

The government suggested that Teixiera might have been searching for mass shootings because he believed the US had advanced knowledge of the massacres, a widespread belief among antigovernment conspiracists.

READ MORE: 'No justification': Lindsey Graham pummels Marjorie Taylor Greene for defending Pentagon leaker

Or he may have been planning a mass shooting of his own. Or both. Plenty of mass shooters are also conspiracy theorists.

The government’s motion revealed that Teixeira was suspended from high school in 2018 after a classmate overhead him talking about “weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial attacks.” The adults around him were so alarmed by his words that they were memorialized in a police report.

For two years, his local police department refused to grant him a firearms identification card because of his record. The local cops only relented after Teixeria wrote to say that he deserved a card, despite what he’d said at school, because he now held a position of trust with the US government.

Joining the military did not help Teixeira outgrow his fixation with mass shooters. In late 2022, Teixeira announced online that he wanted to “kill a [expletive] ton of people” in order to “cull the weak-minded.”

This wasn’t a passing fancy.

Teixeira sought advice on the best rifle to use to make an SUV or a minivan into a mobile assassination platform for use in a “crowded urban or suburban environment.”

With chilling specificity, he indicated that he wanted to pinpoint a target on a sidewalk or porch. Teixeira was still banging on about “mobile gun trucks” and “assassination vehicles” in the weeks before his arrest.

Concerns about Teixeira’s capacity for violence followed him into real life. One of Teixeira’s former colleagues told the FBI that he believed that “he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if Teixeira were to shoot anyone in the workplace.”

The new revelations put an even darker spin on a video that shows Teixeira yelling antisemitic and racist slurs before emptying a large rifle into a target.

The government’s exhibits reveal that Teixeria slept in a camouflage-covered grotto festooned with ghillie netting. Teixeira decorated his room with human-shaped targets full of bullet holes and what appears to be a pennant bearing an emblem of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Investigators found multiple AR-style weapons, a gas mask and a bazooka. A pretrial detention report estimated Teixiera’s net worth at $19,000, half of which was guns.

Of course Marjorie Taylor Greene admires the kid.

During her first campaign, Greene posted a graphic of herself with an assault rifle juxtaposed against a photo of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Squad, which was taken down for violating Facebook’s terms of service.

Greene went on to become a key player in Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election. She later boasted that if she had been in charge, the mob would have been armed.

Greene approves of Teixeira’s because she thinks he helped Russia, and probably because she appreciates the malevolent chaotic energy it takes to betray your country for internet clout.

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene 'demanding answers' from Biden administration about leaked Pentagon documents

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the abortion drug mifepristone will remain available while appeals play out on a lawsuit that sought to take the drug off the market. The fate of mifepristone is critical to abortion access because medication abortions account for a majority of terminations in the U.S. and most of these are carried out with a two-drug regimen that includes mifepristone.

The fact that the high court granted a stay doesn’t automatically mean that the justices will vote to keep mifepristone available. However, it’s noteworthy that only two justices--Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas--opposed the stay.

Longtime Supreme Court-watcher Adam Liptak of the New York Times sees a conservative majority losing its nerve.

READ MORE: A corrupt court in denial is not going to reform itself

The far-right has been gearing up for a national assault on abortion access ever since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe. However, they made the mistake of mounting an embarrassingly weak test case.

An umbrella group of anti-choice doctors challenged the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of a safe drug, long after the statute of limitations for such disputes had elapsed. These doctors don’t even have legal standing to sue over a drug they don’t take and don’t prescribe. The Constitution restricts legal standing to those who have suffered a concrete and identifiable injury from the thing they’re suing over. The best the plaintiffs can say for themselves is that they’ve been injured because they might hypothetically have to see patients who suffered complications from mifepristone prescribed by other doctors. It’s unclear why patients suffering from rare mifepristone complications would stampede to doctors who don’t even do abortions. Or why the possibility of more business for these doctors counts as an injury.

The current bid to yank mifepristone off the market is an outrageous bit of legal hackery whose sponsors deserve points only for shrewd venue shopping. They got their case in front of diehard anti-choice judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a veteran of the abortion wars, whose rulings are laden with contempt for abortion providers and strewn with anti-choice buzzwords.

The Dobbs decision disingenuously promised to restore peace and harmony to America by returning abortion laws to the states. It was obvious from the outset that this was a ruse. National anti-choice groups have set their sights on abolishing abortion at the federal level, which is why they’re trying to get a regulatory do-over for mifepristone 23 years and 5 million abortions after the fact. They claim to care about the safety of patients, but the real answer is that they’re trying to get mifepristone banned because they want to ban abortion nationwide.

READ MORE: How two conflicting federal court decisions led to the Supreme Court’s abortion pill ruling

Mifepristone has been on the market for over 20 years. This progesterone-blocking drug is safer than Tylenol or Viagra. More than 5 million people have used it to end pregnancies in the United States since it was approved by the FDA in 2000. Study after study has shown that mifepristone is both safe and effective, but rather than relying on volumes of scientific evidence, Trump judge Matthew Kacsmaryk was instead swayed by anecdotes from the anti-choice doctors who brought the suit and blog posts.

And there’s another mifepristone challenge waiting in the wings. The anti-choice, anti-birth control group Students for Life has filed a citizen petition with the FDA claiming that the agency didn’t assess mifepristone’s impact on endangered species when it approved the drug. The FDA did, in fact, assess data on mifepristone’s potential environmental impact during the approval process, as it does for all drugs. The group seeking approval supplied calculations that showed that amount of mifepristone that would find its way into the environment was trivial. Littering from the packaging was a bigger concern. But the anti-choice movement isn’t about to permit the truth, logic, or the law, get in the way of its all-out assault on reproductive freedom.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court may not have found the right test case to ban abortion pills nationwide, but their agenda hasn’t changed.

READ MORE: Joy Reid condemns SCOTUS Justice Alito’s attempt to 'play mullah' in abortion pill decision

On Wednesday, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed Senate Bill 13, landmark legislation safeguarding health care providers, patients, and good samaritans involved in abortion or gender-affirming care in New Mexico. It is now illegal for the state to cooperate with lawsuits or criminal investigations launched in other states over care delivered in New Mexico. Nor will New Mexico extradite anyone to another state, if they’re charged for delivering legal care in the Land of Enchantment.

Several states have already passed laws that protect either abortion providers or gender-affirming care providers from these out-of-state overreaches, but a growing number of blue states are trying to protect abortion and trans rights at one go. Legislators in Oregon and Colorado are considering similar combined bills this session.

By including abortion and trans health in the same law, legislators affirm the war on abortion rights and on trans healthcare are one and the same. As well they should. These battles are waged by the same religious fanatics using the same tactics. So-called gender-critical feminists, better known as TERFs, have tried for years to position abortion rights and trans rights as a zero-sum game. Nothing could be further from the truth. The right is mounting a coordinated offensive against bodily autonomy and personal freedom. Abortion and gender-affirming care are in the crosshairs.

READ MORE: 'Making up a boogeyman': Donald Trump Jr. torched for creating anti-trans scenario 'that never happens'

After Roe fell, national antiabortion groups and their allies in state legislatures were not content to criminalize abortion at the state level. Instead, they stepped up their efforts to prevent abortion-seekers from traveling to states where abortion is legal.

Legislators in blue states are trying to get ahead of all this cross-border meddling. One battleground is the use of civil lawsuits to intimidate providers. In 2021, Texas became the first state to enact an abortion ban enforced by civil lawsuits. In principle, abortion providers in blue states can be sued for performing an abortion on someone who traveled from Texas. Texas-style abortion bans were rapidly copied by other states.

A number of red states have already considered bills to restrict travel for abortion care. Last year, an antiabortion legislator in Missouri tried to criminalize aiding and abetting an abortion outside the state of Missouri. Such laws are prima facie unconstitutional, so supporters are taking an incremental approach in an attempt to normalize their power grab.

This is similar to the approach the antichoice movement took pre-Roe, passing laws to restrict abortion on the margins with a view to undermining the constitutional consensus that Roe was the law of the land. Care for minors is often a convenient place to start.

READ MORE: So much for Republicans believing in 'states' rights'

Last week, Idaho became the first to criminalize adults de facto – adults who take minors across state lines for abortions without parental permission. The law doesn’t say anything about crossing state lines, but that’s what you have to do if you’re in Idaho and you need a legal abortion.

Similar tactics are used on trans kids. For two years, far-right Idaho legislators have tried to make it a felony to take children out of state for gender-affirming care. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott ordered child protective services to investigate parents for seeking gender-affirming care, and the state’s attorney general later affirmed that gender-affirming care is child abuse under state law. This opens the door to interstate investigations of parents who travel to obtain health care for their children.

The far right developed and refined a common playbook for projecting the power of red states beyond their borders to intimidate and coerce. Sanctuary laws are an important step to check this outrageous power grab.

READ MORE: 'And they call us pedophiles': Kansas GOP admonished for overriding governor's veto of trans athlete ban

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo went mask-off (so to speak) at a press conference in Winter Haven, Florida, Thursday, revealing himself to be an unvarnished antivaxer.

"These vaccines have a terrible safety profile at this point in the pandemic," Ladapo said of the covid vaccines, "You know, I'm not sure anyone should be taking them and that's the honest truth."

"Respectable" antivaxers are normally at pains to convince the public that they're only concerned about the mRNA vaccines, or the use of vaccines in certain populations. For example, they'll say they're not against covid vaccines per se, they're just worried that the risks don't justify the benefits for young men, or for boosters, or whatever. That was Ladapo's tack until the CDC and the FDA eviscerated him in a letter last week, debunking his insinuation that an uptick in reported adverse events is an indication that the covid vaccines are unsafe.

READ MORE: DeSantis to run on 'We were right, they were wrong' COVID results slogan when Florida ranks among the worst

Last month, Ladapo wrote to the heads of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Like so many antivaxers, Ladapo has been doing his own research. Unlike most cranks, he briefly came under investigation for allegedly falsifying the data his department put out about covid vaccines. In his letter, pointed out that reports of adverse vaccine events to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database had risen since the covid vaccines were introduced.

Judging by his grumbling about federal health agencies at the press conference, Ladapo's feelings were hurt by the reply he got last week from FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Anyone would be. The two agency heads neatly dismantled Ladapo’s claim that an increase in adverse event reports since the advent of the covid vaccines is an indicator that the covid vaccines are unsafe. The two agency heads also accused Ladapo of fuelling vaccine hesitancy and undermining public health.

"The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public," the commish and director wrote. They went on to explain exactly why Ladapo's inflammatory statistics are misleading.

"Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination do not mean that a vaccine caused the event," Califf and Walensky said, zeroing in on the logical fallacy behind Ladapo's inflammatory claims, and adding that "The Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for the COVID-19 Vaccines require sponsors and vaccine providers to report certain adverse events through VAERS, so more reports should be expected."

READ MORE: 'I obviously don't have evidence': House Republican has a wild new conspiracy about COVID-19 origins

In other words, anyone can submit a report to VAERS if they think there's any connection between a vaccine and a symptom. Moreover, covid vaccines are special because healthcare providers are required to report adverse events even if they don't believe there's any link between the shot and the symptoms. This extra-low reporting threshold is part of the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring program in US history. As Califf and Walensky pointed out in their letter, the CDC and FDA are already well aware of the VAERS reports and that they've been actively looking into them to make sure they're not signs of a larger safety problem.

"Both FDA and CDC have continued to collect outcome data from multiple sources that demonstrate the clear benefit of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing death, serious illness, and hospitalization from SARS-CoV-2 infection, along with indicating a modest benefit in the prevention of infection and transmission that wanes over time, even as new variants have emerged."

Ladapo's shift to a hardcore antivaxery may also reflect the presidential ambitions of his boss, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis believes that antivax is the fast lane to the White House, and Ladapo is his eager co-pilot.

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis and Florida's Doctor Antivax

Proponents of the covid lab leak theory proclaimed themselves vindicated this week after the Wall Street Journalreported that a team at the US Department of Energy now asserts, with "low confidence," that the coronavirus most likely spread to humans in a lab accident.

It's an odd moment for a victory lap.

By definition a low-confidence assessment is based on information that is deemed to have serious credibility or plausibility problems.

READ MORE:'I obviously don't have evidence': House Republican has a wild new conspiracy about COVID-19 origins

We don't know what data the DOE referred to in its five-page classified addendum to a 2021 report. But we do know other intelligence agencies were privy to the same data. They did not change their assessments.

The overall verdict of the US intelligence community remains that covid-19 probably spread naturally from animals to humans, and that it is neither a bioweapon nor a genetically engineered construct.

Even relatively good news isn't enough to distract the lab leakers from their profound sense of victimhood. Ingrid Jacques' USA Todaycolumn originally ran under the headline "COVID lab leak wasn't a conspiracy theory. Where's our apology?" It was subsequently toned down, but it captured the mood. The news of DOE's about-face prompted Jonathan Chait of New York to accuse left-wing "dead enders" of unfairly mocking lab leak boosters as cranks and conspiracy theorists. The underlying assumption seems to be that if an intelligence agency asserts something, it can't possibly be a conspiracy theory.

This reasoning is highly questionable. It should come as no surprise that the people we hire to suss out conspiracies can be sympathetic to conspiratorial explanations.

READ MORE: Republicans bumble about 'bioweapons' after FBI director promotes COVID 'lab leak' theory on Fox News

Lab leak theories are conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are not necessarily false, but they have built-in credibility problems that put them at a disadvantage compared to theories that don’t presuppose conspiracies.

For example, conspiracies require people to keep highly charged secrets, often in the face of enormous pressures to talk. Journalists should know how hard it is to keep people from blabbing. Our whole business is predicated on people’s inability to keep their mouths shut.

Conspiracies also require conspirators to be hyper-competent and diligent in carrying out their schemes so as not to leave evidence of their machinations. Here in the real world, we can’t even keep high-level officials from falling for phishing scams.

A lab accident is not a conspiracy. However, in 2023, all versions of the lab leak theory presuppose a conspiracy of some sort.

The most limited version is a lab accident that was covered up by a small group of scientists, without the knowledge or assistance of the Chinese government. It's a bit of a stretch to think that any such effort could stay secret for long at a high-security lab in a total surveillance society like China.

Which is why most lab leakers assume that the Chinese government played a key role in covering up the accident. Many lab leak boosters also believe that multiple US government agencies and NGOs were also involved.

Let's review the conspiracies that even the most modest and sober versions of the lab leak theory presuppose.

The secret virus

After all this time, there’s no evidence any lab in the world had the SARS-CoV-2 virus or any virus that could have been tweaked to make SARS-Cov-2 prior to the pandemic.

That's the ground truth from which every discussion of the origins of the virus must proceed. A lab can't leak what it hasn't got.

If SARS-Cov-2 first infected humans because of a lab accident, the lab must have secretly acquired the virus. Some versions of the lab leak theory insinuate that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been holding onto SCV-2 for years. This is not a plausible assumption.

Publish or perish is the order of the day. If your lab's fame and funding come from discovering new viruses, your incentive is to publish those discoveries promptly. And, since we’re assuming the leak was an accident, it's unclear why the lab would have wanted to hide such a discovery. After all, they couldn't have known it was going to leak.

Alleged gain-of-function program

Most proponents of the lab leak theory aren't interested in a banal accident scenario where a researcher got infected while, say, photographing the raccoon dogs at the Huanan Market.

They're interested in the idea that SCoV-2 was created by a gain-of-function research program. At least this hypothesis gives us a plausible motive for secrecy. Gain-of-function research is controversial. However, the GOF conjecture locks us into a whole secret research program and therefore more elaborate conspiracy.

An accident and a seamless coverup: In addition, you have to posit that whatever accident released SARS-Cov-2 was covered up and that the conspiracy has held fast to this day. If the Chinese government knows about it, it has successfully dodged the best eavesdropping efforts of the entire US intelligence community. The DOE low-confidence addendum underscores that there are still no solid leads.

Involvement of US government agencies and NGOs

Most prominent lab leak conspiracy theorists go even further. They want us to believe that multiple US government agencies, from the National Institutes of Health to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, helped fund the secret gain-of-function program that supposedly gave rise to covid. They also want to insinuate that this research program involved highly respected scientists from around the world. Numerous congressional Republican investigations are based on this premise. Once the conspiracy widens to include large numbers of outspoken scientists and US bureaucrats who live to create paper trails, the thesis goes from implausible to untenable.

Note that none of the aforementioned versions of the lab leak assume anything about covid being developed as a bioweapon or deployed intentionally by the Chinese, but they're still conspiracy theories.

READ MORE: 'Breaking the pot': China demands Elon Musk stop promoting COVID-19 lab leak theory

Last week, Dr. Joseph Ladapo issued a meaningless "health alert" to the people of Florida about mRNA covid vaccines.

Ladapo was back last week when it emerged that he'd been investigated for allegedly falsifying data for a previous antivax gambit.

The investigation was closed after the tipster clammed up.

READ MORE: This popular church app has become a 'dark' hotbed of anti-vaxxer extremism: report

The recent health alert was based on an uptick in reports to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Ladapo baselessly alleges that increased reporting must point to safety problems with covid vaccines.

However, the increase in 2021 and 2022 is better explained by the biggest and most carefully-monitored vaccine rollout in US history, more stringent reporting requirements for COVID vaccines, and increased public awareness of the VAERS system.

It's malpractice for a government agency to issue health directives based on VAERS data. VAERS reports guide future research, not shape medical decision-making.

VAERS data are correlational and unvetted. Anyone can report that they experienced any symptoms after receiving a vaccine.

READ MORE: The inherent racism of anti-vaxx movements

Healthcare providers are required to report some adverse events, but compliance has historically been spotty.

Antivaxers love to claim that 32,000 people have died from the covid vaccine, because there have been 32,000 reports of people dying after being vaccinated.

VAERS provides zero evidence any of these people died because of the vaccine.

VAERS scientists look for unusual patterns.

If they think they see a signal, they'll pull medical records or death certificates to confirm these patients actually got the vaccine and actually experienced the adverse event, say, heart failure.

But even then, further research would be needed to determine whether the vaccine is the culprit – or an innocent bystander.

COVID vaccines came with much stricter VAERS reporting requirements than other adult vaccines. What's more, the government worked to educate doctors about their new responsibilities. Healthcare providers are legally required to report all major adverse events following a COVID vaccine, whether they're plausibly connected to the vaccine or not.

So if the patient gets struck by lightning on their way home from the vaccine clinic, their doctor is supposed to report it, just in case.

To make matters worse, some major antivax groups and personal injury attorneys coach their followers to make VAERS reports about third parties.

Antivax propaganda drives VAERS reports and antivaxers point to increased VAERS reports as proof that the vaccines are dangerous.

Media and internet exposure also drive VAERS reporting. When vaccine safety is in the news, people are more likely to attribute their symptoms to vaccines and more motivated to report those symptoms to VAERS. The media firestorm over Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent paper linking vaccines and autism boosted VAERS reporting rates for the MMR vaccine. VAERS reports also rose for Gardasil when the right decided that vaccinating young girls against cervical cancer was grooming.

The antivax site OpenVAERS now gets more traffic than the real VAERS website. Between December 2020, when the COVID vaccines first rolled out to mid-August of 2021, right-wing media like Fox and Breitbart mentioned VAERS seven times more often than mainstream outlets.

This is not the first time Ladapo has misused surveillance data to push governor Ron DeSantis's antivax agenda.

Last year, he disregarded CDC guidelines and recommended against covid mRNA vaccines for men aged 18 to 39. He did this based on a severely flawed, non-peer-reviewed study conducted by unnamed individuals within the Florida Department of Health.

This was the same project that generated the investigation into potential data falsification. A faculty committee convened by Ladapo's peers at the University of Florida condemned him for "careless, irregular, or contentious research practices."

Amongst other things, the professors faulted Ladapo for misuse of statistics and cherry-picking his data.

As a contributor to the USA Today network put it, "Ladapo is emerging as a central player in the governor's outreach to vaccine skeptics and opponents who now form a stunningly large part of the GOP's national voter base."

DeSantis is trying to brand himself as the biggest antivax loon in the GOP presidential primary.

It's a tall order, but Ladapo is prepared to do whatever it takes.

READ MORE: The antivaxers' ghoulish exploitation of dead celebrities

Now that both Joe Biden and Mike Pence have been caught keeping classified documents at home, it's tempting to make a false equivalence between their bad behavior and Donald Trump's 20-month campaign to steal classified information.

To their credit, Biden and Pence have cooperated fully with investigators.

Whereas, Trump went to extraordinary lengths to hang onto his illicit secrets.

READ MORE: 'Earthshaking' subpoenas suggest Trump had his 'lawyers commit crimes for him': analysis

In fact, the former president is still fighting.

Still hanging on

Here's a very compressed history of Trump's fight to steal secrets.

Government archivists asked him to return presidential records, including classified material in January 2022. Trump sent back a token amount and fought for months to hang onto the rest, forcing the archives to turn to the Justice Department.

READ MORE: Trump attorney hires his own attorney as DOJ classified documents probe ramps up

In May, the DOJ got a subpoena for all documents bearing marks of classification. A month later, Trump's lawyer handed over a mere 38 classified documents. That was it. He swore to it. Well, actually, he got some other sucker to swear to it.

That might have been it had not security cameras caught Trump's Diet Coke valet moving boxes out of a storage unit at Mar-a-Lago before and after the subpoena.

The valet admitted Trump personally ordered him to move the boxes, prompting the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago in August. That search yielded 184 more classified documents, including nuclear secrets.

As he keeps reminding us, Trump owns many properties. Unfathomably, Trump's people were allowed to do their own searches of sites including Trump Tower and the Bedminster golf club. The search team turned over two more classified documents they found in a West Palm Beach storage locker.

Classified material continues to trickle out of Trumpland. At least 300 classified documents were taken from the White House, and those are just the ones investigators knew of. Trump's chaotic management style could have allowed many more to go missing without anyone being able to track them. So, it's a near certainty that Trump is still hanging on to some classified material.

Why nobody

Recently, several news outlets have regaled the public with the tale of goofy Uncle Donald using a folder marked "classified" to block a blue light on his landline phone that was keeping him up at night.

That folder was turned over by Trump's private investigators. Like a bad magician, Trump is redirecting our attention to the goofy "lampshade." If we’re focused on office supplies repurposed as interior decor, we’re not talking about how Team Trump also recently relinquished a document with classified markings, an aide's laptop, and a thumb drive. All classified material they should have disclosed earlier.

In December, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to hold Trump (or his office) in contempt. Trump's team claimed they searched four of his properties before Thanksgiving. The Justice Department said those searches were not adequate and therefore that Trump was still flouting the six-month-old subpoena that requires him to turn over all classified material in his possession.

To the Justice Department's great frustration, Trump has refused to appoint a custodian of records, a single person who can certify that all classified material has been handed over, and who can be held personally responsible if that’s not true.

You can see why nobody wants the job.

Team Trump swears they've given everything back, but assurances mean nothing.

We are inured

Judge Beryl Howell has not yet ruled on whether Trump will be held in contempt.

Trump has been scoffing at a subpoena for six months. Anyone else would have been charged with obstruction of justice months ago, but we've become inured to the idea that there's a different standard of justice for Trump than for anyone else.

READ MORE: How special counsel Smith is fighting 'at least 8 secret court battles' in Trump probes: report

The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pressing the Department of Justice for details about a former FBI agent who was indicted for working for a sanctioned Russian oligarch and laundering the proceeds.

Charles F. McGonigal retired as special agent in charge of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office in 2018. McGonigal allegedly began cooperating with an agent of aluminum baron Oleg Deripaska while he was still working for the FBI. Deripaska is under indictment for allegedly evading sanctions and obstructing justice.

Dick Durban raised urgent questions in his open letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. As Durban noted, McGonigal was promoted to special agent in charge just before the FBI’s October 2016 announcement that it saw no ties between Trump and Russia.

READ MORE: 'Corrupt, fixable and usable': Why Trump’s 'decades-old playbook' is finally losing its appeal

Durban is asking the questions that are on everyone’s mind:

Did McGonigal do anything to tip the scales of justice in favor of anyone he’s now linked to in the indictments? What roles did McGonigal play in the 2016 FBI’s Trump-Russia probe and the Mueller investigation? Is there any chance that McGonigal compromised sources, methods or evidence? How did one of the most elite counterintelligence operations not notice that one of its main guys was allegedly doing favors for a sanctioned Russian oligarch while he was still on the FBI payroll.

Deripaska’s history with the FBI is long and bizarre. The FBI has investigated Deripaska for links to Russian organized crime.

Nevertheless, 2007, the FBI colluded with Deripaska to spring a kidnapped CIA contractor from captivity in Iran. His name is Robert Levinson and he was an FBI agent before he went to work for the CIA.

Deripaska reportedly spent $25 million of his own money on the mission. You might wonder why the FBI needs a Russian oligarch’s money. The idealistic answer is that Iran is under economic sanctions, so Americans couldn’t legally spend money there. Realistically, it’s probably because some of that money went to bribe people the FBI regards as terrorists. Deripaska went along with this scheme because the FBI was supposed to make his US visa problems go away.

READ MORE: Trump vows to use DOJ and Congress to make transgender care illegal while promoting the 'nuclear family'

They didn’t.

And Levinson didn’t get to come home.

The US State Department had barred Deripaska from the country because of his alleged ties to Russian organized crime. Evidently, they were on the cusp of a deal to release Levinson when the mean-old State Department scuttled the visa scheme once and for all – possibly because they didn’t want to be in the debt of a man like Deripaska.

Undeterred, the FBI tried to enlist Deripaska’s help again in 2014, first as an informant on Russian organized crime and in 2016 as a source for their probe into the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Two months before Donald Trump was elected, FBI agents reportedly visited Deripaska in New York City and asked him whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. Deripaska put on his best innocent face and insisted that the agents were making something out of nothing.

By this point, campaign manager Paul Manafort had been feeding sensitive campaign and polling data to Deripaska’s associate for months, information that made its way to Russian intelligence. It’s unclear how much impact Deripaska’s denial had on the FBI’s later announcement that it knew of no links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Did the FBI’s attempts to recruit Deripaska ultimately result in Deripaska recruiting a top FBI agent? A recent story in the Times strongly implies as much, albeit without providing much in the way of supporting evidence.

Let’s hope that answers are forthcoming.

READ MORE: Trump's 'Republican establishment' opponents don't realize they're fighting 'a new kind of war': data analyst