"Klansmen in Keffiyehs"

University presidents last week finally said aloud what many Americans suspected: the pro-Palestinian uprisings that swept across campuses after Hamas’s October 7 attack were not spontaneous acts of youthful conscience but were well-coordinated and funded. “It’s more than a social contagion,” said Vanderbilt’s chancellor. “They’re organized networks as well.” Syracuse’s chancellor went further: “I really believe [the demonstrations] were encouraged by Iran. It did not have the involvement of very many, if any, of our own students.”America has a powerful legal weapon—the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871—that the Department of Justice should use to stop the rise of coordinated, foreign-influenced and financed antisemitic hate groups operating under the guise of political activism.American administrations have not hesitated to dust off centuries-old laws when it serves their purpose. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the 1807 Insurrection Act, even an 1873 obscenity law banning the mailing of ‘indecent’ material have all been revived in recent years.Congress enacted the Klan Act in the aftermath of Reconstruction, when white-supremacist militias terrorized freedmen and Black voters while state officials looked away. The law empowered federal prosecutors to target private conspiracies that deprived citizens of their civil rights through violence or intimidation.Over 150 years later, that same legal tool might be more useful than ever. Its central provision—18 U.S.C. § 241—remains one of the most powerful civil-rights tools on the books. President Biden’s Justice Department used it in 2023 to indict Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to subvert the 2020 election. Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged over the death of George Floyd, pleaded guilty in 2021 to violating § 242, another section of the same act that covers abuses of authority “under color of law.”In January, President Trump’s own executive order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” explicitly cited § 241 and encouraged the attorney general to employ it against antisemitic threats. But the DOJ is not using the statute for its full powers when it comes to dealing with online threats. One of the most important aspects of § 241 is that it does not require an overt act to prove a conspiracy. And § 1985(3) of the Klan Act makes it unlawful for “two or more persons” to conspire to deprive any citizen of “equal protection of the laws” or “equal privileges and immunities.”All the KKK statutes require is an agreement to threaten or intimidate someone in their federal rights. It is important that courts allow conspiracies under this law to be proved by circumstantial evidence. That is key when it comes to online coordination with pro-Hamas/anti-Israel demonstrators who plan their actions over the internet. Online threats are not just speech—they can constitute evidence of conspiracy to deprive Jews of their right to education, association, or religious practice. In recent years, the DOJ has used § 241 against online campaigns that intimidated voters and abortion patients as well as white supremacists and violent anti-Black conspiracies. That precedent should be extended to antisemitic intimidation campaigns.When campus groups coordinate online to harass Jewish students, blockade events, or pressure universities to exclude Jews from campus life, they are engaged in a civil-rights conspiracy—no less than the hooded KKK members who once burned crosses to keep Black Americans from voting. A legal brief filed by the Zachor Legal Institute with DOJ earlier this year documented Jewish students at UCLA literally hunted across campus by masked Students for Justice for Palestine activists, some carrying knives. At Cornell, Jewish students received online threats of rape and beheading. At Cooper Union in New York, Jewish students barricaded themselves in a library while mobs pounded on the doors. These are not theoretical concerns—they are the modern equivalent of Klan night-riders, adapted to 21st-century campuses. The Zachor lawyers called them “Klansmen in Keffiyehs.”Another element of the KKK statutes that the DOJ should deploy is § 242. It applies to public officials who abuse their positions “under color of law” to deprive others of their rights. Public university faculty or administrators who advise, fund, or exclude Jewish students from classes while supporting antisemitic groups can be held liable under this provisionWhen mobs physically block Jewish students from entering a classroom or religious or secular event, as documented above, that squarely falls under § 245, which protects the right to attend public education or federally funded programs free of intimidation or violence. The Department of Justice enforcement is critical since Jewish students can’t bring these prosecutions themselves. The KKK statutes were designed for precisely this kind of situation: when mobs, sometimes aided by local officials, conspire to deny a minority group its place in public life. Congress wrote the KKK statutes for federal prosecutors to step in when citizens couldn’t defend themselves. That was true in 1871, and it’s true on campuses today. The KKK statutes once dismantled segregationist terror networks. They can do the same to the Hamas-inspired, foreign-funded agitators targeting Jewish students today.Antisemitism in America is no longer confined to the fringes of the internet or neo-Nazi rallies. It has infiltrated elite universities and corporate boardrooms, often financed by foreign money and legitimized by academic doublespeak. The myth of “consequence-free hate” has taken root.Just this month, Federal Election Commission filings revealed that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign paid more than a thousand dollars to a Washington D.C. nonprofit, the Palestine House of Freedom, whose website celebrates the “liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.” The group partners with a Palestinian university accused of terror ties and vows to “embark on an aggressive educational campaign” targeting U.S. lawmakers and the media.That money trail is a reminder that Hamas’s influence operations aren’t confined to foreign soil. They’re operating in America’s capital, on American campuses, and across American social networks.The question is whether Washington will use the legal weapons it already has. The Ku Klux Klan Act once saved the Union’s promise of equal rights. One hundred and fifty years later, it can do so again—this time for Jewish Americans facing a new generation of hate. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

Last week’s headline that President Trump asked Billy Long to resign—making him the seventh IRS commissioner to leave this year—masked a much deeper crisis. The Internal Revenue Service is facing its worst operational breakdown in modern history just as it must implement one of the most sweeping tax code overhauls in a generation. Charged with collecting $5 trillion a year, the agency has endured leadership turmoil, lost a quarter of its workforce, and now confronts budget cuts that could slash enforcement by half.The timing could not be worse.The Trump administration's “One Big Beautiful Bill”—an 800-page behemoth that promised tax simplification—has instead added over 100 new provisions to an already labyrinthine tax code. Some of the provisions include temporary measures, phase-outs, narrowly targeted exemptions, and complex calculations that will challenge even seasoned tax professionals. Yet, the agency responsible for making sense of it all is in disarray.Chaos in the C-SuiteThe leadership bedlam began immediately after President Trump's inauguration when Danny Werfel, a respected career public servant who had successfully navigated the agency through both Republican and Democratic administrations, submitted his resignation. What followed is administrative whiplash.Doug O'Donnell, a 35-year IRS veteran, lasted just 33 days as acting commissioner. His departure was followed by Melanie Krause, whose tenure ended abruptly when she refused to comply with a directive to share taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a move she argued violated taxpayer privacy laws and would destroy public trust in the agency.In April, Elon Musk, leveraged his influence within the administration, and successfully pushed for the appointment of Gary Shapley, a former IRS criminal investigator who had gained prominence as a whistleblower in politically charged investigations. That move reportedly blindsided Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who traditionally oversees IRS appointments. The resulting power struggle created such dysfunction that Shapley resigned after just 48 hours—the shortest tenure of any IRS commissioner in history.“It was amateur hour,” says a senior Treasury official who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “You had Musk making promises he couldn't keep, Bessent in a fury, and meanwhile, no one was actually running the IRS during tax season.”Michael Faulkender attempted to stabilize the situation by serving dual roles as both Deputy Treasury Secretary and acting IRS Commissioner, but the arrangement proved untenable. It appeared that everything at the top post had settled in July when the Senate confirmed former Missouri Congressman Billy Long as Commissioner. The White House surprised almost everyone on August 8 when it confirmed Long had been asked to submit his resignation and that Treasury Secretary Bessent would act as the interim commissioner until a new replacement was named (Long is slated to be named as ambassador to Iceland).Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner — Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The Great Resignation, IRS EditionWhile leadership played musical chairs, rank-and-file employees headed for the exits. The numbers are staggering: 25,000 employees—representing nearly a quarter of the agency's workforce—are expected to leave by September 30. This is not natural attrition; it's an exodus accelerated by a voluntary deferred resignation program and targeted layoffs.The brain drain is particularly acute in critical areas. The Office of Chief Counsel has lost 40% of its senior attorneys. The Large Business and International division, responsible for auditing corporations with assets over $10 million, has seen departures of 60% of its most experienced revenue agents. Criminal Investigations, the arm that pursues tax fraud and money laundering, is operating at 50% capacity.These are not just employees—they're walking encyclopedias of tax law, audit techniques, and institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced by hiring fresh college graduates.The telephone assistance division, often taxpayers' first point of contact with the agency, has been decimated. Over 9,000 customer service representatives have been let go or reassigned. During the 2024 filing season, average wait times exceeded two hours, with only 11% of calls being answered—the worst performance in IRS history. The agency's plan to hire temporary workers for the 2026 filing season is widely seen as inadequate.“The most serious problem facing taxpayers today is the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code,” according to Nina Olson, who served as National Taxpayer Advocate for 18 years. She made that observation in 2006, when the tax code was simple in comparison to today’s version. Insiders acknowledge it will be impossible to train temporary workers on 800 pages of new tax law in a few weeks. They will be overwhelmed, taxpayers will be frustrated, and errors will multiply exponentially.Technology: Running on Digital FumesPerhaps nowhere is the IRS crisis more acute than in its technology infrastructure. The agency still relies on systems dating back to the 1960s, including master files written in COBOL—a programming language so outdated that finding programmers who understand it has become increasingly difficult and expensive.The Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act had allocated $80 billion over 10 years for IRS modernization, with $15 billion specifically earmarked for technology upgrades. Those plans are now in jeopardy. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), established by executive order to oversee federal spending, has frozen all modernization funds pending a “comprehensive strategic review.”“The review is supposed to take six months,” says a senior IRS technology official who requested anonymity. “But we don't have six months. We need to program the new tax law changes now. Every day of delay means more manual processing, more errors, and longer delays for taxpayers.”The technology freeze has halted critical projects, including a new taxpayer portal that would allow real-time status updates on refunds and correspondence; artificial intelligence tools to identify fraudulent returns and suspicious claims; modernization of the Individual Master File, the core system that processes individual tax returns; and enhanced cybersecurity measures to protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks on taxpayer data.“We're asking a Model T to perform like a Tesla,” the technology official adds. “It's not just inefficient—it's dangerous. We're one major system failure away from being unable to process returns at all.”The New Tax Law: Complexity Masquerading as SimplificationThe “One Big Beautiful Bill” promised tax simplification. But it has made the tax code exponentially more complex. That is compounded by the IRS's inability to provide guidance. Typically, major tax legislation is followed by thousands of pages of regulations, revenue rulings, and procedures that explain how the law should be interpreted and applied. With the exodus of experienced attorneys from the Chief Counsel's office, that guidance is unlikely to materialize in time for the 2026 filing season.Budget Cuts: The Final BlowAs if leadership chaos, staff departures, and technological paralysis were not enough, the IRS now faces the prospect of devastating budget cuts. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed reducing the agency's budget from $12.3 billion to $9.5 billion—a 23% cut that would be the largest in IRS history.The cuts specifically target enforcement, with a proposed 48% reduction in funding for audits and collections. This comes at a time when the “tax gap” —the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid—has reached a record $688 billion annually, according to the latest IRS estimates.Instead of saving money, cutting enforcement costs money. The IRS could return about $5 to $7 of increased tax collection for every additional dollar of enforcement funding, Charles Rettig, who served as IRS Commissioner, told Congress in 2021.The practical implications are stark: audit rates for millionaires will fall below 1%, down from 8% a decade ago; corporate audits would essentially cease for all but the largest multinational corporations; criminal prosecutions for tax evasion would decline by an estimated 75%; identity theft and refund fraud investigations would be dramatically curtailed (there are 387,000 unresolved cases of identity theft as of June 2025, with an average resolution time of 20 months).“Underfunding the IRS is like underfunding your accounts receivable department,” Mark Mazur, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, warned Congress in 2017. “No rational business would do that.”The Hidden Costs of CollapseThe immediate effects of the IRS crisis are already visible: longer wait times, delayed refunds, and reduced enforcement. But tax experts warn that the long-term consequences could fundamentally alter America's tax system.“Tax evasion is widespread, always has been, and probably always will be,” said Joel Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michigan who studies tax administration. In a system built on voluntary compliance, once taxpayers lose faith that everyone is paying their fair share, compliance rates drop.“If Visa sent you a blank piece of paper each month instead of a bill, you’d say, ‘This is crazy,’” says Joseph Bankman, a Stanford professor of tax law.International comparisons are sobering. Greece's tax collection system collapsed in the 2000s due to weak enforcement and low public trust, contributing to its debt crisis. Italy loses an estimated €100 billion annually to tax evasion, partly due to inadequate tax administration. Argentina's tax gap exceeds 30% of potential revenue.The U.S. is not yet Greece or Italy. Yet, as opposed to corruption or incompetence that have crippled the foreign systems, the U.S. is heading in that direction from deliberate policy.The business community is increasingly concerned. The Tax Executives Institute, representing corporate tax departments, warns that uncertainty around tax law interpretation and enforcement could impact investment decisions and financial planning. Corporations need predictability and uncertainty can adversely affect everything from quarterly earnings to long-term planning.The Clock Is TickingThe 2026 filing season begins in less than six months. By then, taxpayers will need to navigate new tax laws with less help from an agency in crisis. The delayed start date—pushed to mid-February—is just the beginning of what promises to be the most chaotic tax season in memory.An administration that promised to drain the swamp and make government work better has instead created a crisis that threatens the basic functioning of federal revenue collection. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” may end up being remembered not for its tax cuts but for breaking the agency responsible for implementing it.As one senior IRS official put it, speaking on condition of anonymity: “We're not just watching the IRS collapse. We're watching the collapse of the basic compact between citizens and their government. And once that's gone, it's almost impossible to get back.”Preventing the dismantling of the American tax administration would seem to be a nonpartisan issue. Yet, there is no sign the IRS has any influential supporters in the Trump administration. Most inside the agency pin their hope on Treasury Secretary Bessent, who at least understands that the fallout from failure would extend far beyond this administration.“Aggressive reductions in the I.R.S.’s resources will only render our government less effective and less efficient in collecting the taxes Congress has imposed,” seven former IRS commissioners wrote in a New York Times OpEd this past February. “It will shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S. to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone. . . . our country needs a fully functioning tax system.”No one likes paying taxes, so it is hardly shocking that the IRS is very unpopular. Some may cheer a smaller, less capable agency. However, if it has trouble fulfilling its core mission—collecting the revenue that keeps the government running—Americans will pay the ultimate cost for any shortfall.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner — Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

In 1933, the Third Reich passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases—a chilling attempt to control who was allowed to be born, rooted in pseudo-scientific notions of “racial purity” and Aryan superiority. Nazi medical schools taught students to worship genetic “perfection,” and had the tools of today’s genetic science existed then, it’s not hard to imagine how ruthlessly they would have deployed them. The Third Reich’s obsession with genetic purity laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. The specter of eugenics haunts every new advance in reproductive technology, and today, that ghost is stirring again.Last week, a coalition of leading scientific organizations—including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy—called for a 10-year global moratorium on human genetic editing. Their message is clear: the science is moving faster than our understanding of its risks, and the ethical questions it raises are more urgent than ever.The immediate spark for this renewed debate is a new software platform from Nucleus Genomics, a company founded by 25-year-old Kian Sadeghi, and backed by tech luminaries like Peter Thiel and Alexis Ohanian. What they have created sounds like the premise of a near-future sci-fi thriller: prospective parents, sitting with a dashboard of up to 20 potential embryos, ranking them based on over 900 traits. These include medical risks—like Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, schizophrenia—but also non-medical characteristics such as eye color, predicted height, BMI, and yes, even markers associated with IQ.They aren’t just choosing health—they’re choosing a child’s future identity.Nucleus calls it “genetic optimization.” Critics call it something else: consumer driven eugenics.What sets this apart from the preimplantation genetic screening already used to avoid serious heritable diseases is the scale, ambition, and philosophical shift: from preventing harm to engineering superiority. Newsweek reports that early users are sorting embryos based on polygenic scores for intelligence and mental illness—sliding ever closer to a world in which undesired traits are quietly discarded before birth by those able to afford the technology.Even the voluntary pursuit of perfection, especially when fueled by inequality and tech utopianism, raises serious ethical questions. Who decides what traits are “desirable”? And who besides those capable of paying for it get access to this technology?Dr. Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU, has been warning for decades about what happens when genetic knowledge meets market forces and parental ambition. In recent comments, he emphasized that genes aren’t destiny. Even identical twins with the same DNA often live radically different lives based on upbringing, environment, or sheer chance.And there are societal consequences of letting wealthy, well-informed parents create genetically curated offspring while poorer families are left behind. One tech investor’s “optimized child” could be another parent’s “genetic underclass.” We risk creating a society where privilege is literally written into our DNA—a new kind of hereditary elite.Some in the longevity movement—where Sadeghi and his investors have ideological roots—frame this as empowering. They see a world where humans engineer themselves out of disease, decline, even death. But that vision requires a brutal calculus: decide who gets born, and who doesn’t.As Liz Wolfe at Reason wrote, “This isn’t about Baby Mozart anymore. It’s about a world where parental choice intersects with Silicon Valley hubris and deeply personal ethics.”Some ethicists fear a coming homogeneity—a world where parents converge around the same desirable traits, slowly narrowing the spectrum of human diversity. NYU’s Caplan said this could undermine human resilience at the species level. And the “solution” from some defenders is both chilling and telling: store vast numbers of frozen embryos with diverse traits, in case we need them later.That’s not empowerment. That’s speculative breeding.What’s most unsettling is the regulatory void. Despite the profound moral, social, and biological stakes, the U.S. has no coherent policy or laws on polygenic screening or embryo optimization. As with many types of technology, including AI, the advances come at breakneck speed, faster than society’s ability to regulate and to institute safety guidelines.That leaves the terrain wide open for ambitious startups and their investors to set the rules themselves.Dr. Bruce Levine, a professor of cancer gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been blunt: “Germline editing has very serious safety concerns that could have irreversible consequences. We simply lack the tools to make it safe now and for at least the next 10 years.”So, is this science fiction? Or is it our future?The more urgent question might be this: Whose future is it?Because once you start choosing which embryos get born based on traits, the line between medicine and ideology vanishes. And history has already shown us how dangerous that can be.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

The United States is home to just 5% of the world’s population—but we generate 75% of global pharmaceutical profits.That imbalance was at the heart of my Oxford Union debate last week.Now, there's a fresh example of how drug companies wring outsized returns from the U.S. market.Gilead Sciences, a California biotech giant, is best known for Truvada, its HIV prevention drug (PrEP), which brought in more than $30 billion.But here’s what most people don’t know:The research and testing behind Truvada were paid for by the CDC, NIH, and the Gates Foundation. Gilead’s sole contribution? Supplying the pills for clinical trials.When the U.S. government patented Truvada in 2015—aiming to distribute it affordably worldwide—Gilead sued to block it. The courts sided with Gilead.Truvada costs $6 a month to manufacture. Gilead sold it for $1,600 to $2,000 a month—a 25,000% markup.Now that the patent has expired and generic Truvada is available for as little as $40 a year, Gilead needs a new cash cow.Enter lenacapavir, a long-acting injectable version of PrEP. Just two shots a year, instead of a daily pill.Before the FDA, Gilead argued that “some people face significant barriers to taking a daily pill,” and that its injectable offers “a more convenient alternative.” It cited data showing Truvada was only 26% effective in certain groups, largely due to skipped doses.This is a classic pharma strategy: take an old drug, tweak the delivery method, and get a fresh 20-year patent. It’s called “evergreening,” and it’s wildly lucrative.The price of Gilead’s new injectable? $28,000 a year per patient.Gilead expects to rake in over $50 billion from the drug while it’s under patent.Ka-ching. 💰💲Welcome to the world of Big Pharma.P.S. My Oxford Union debate on profits and healthcare will be online soon. When it is, Just the Facts subscribers will be the first to get it. Stay tuned. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

My take on the enduring seductive power of conspiracies This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

Many people think I am a conspiracy debunker since I concluded in Case Closed, my 1993 reexamination of the JFK assassination, that Oswald alone had killed the president.Not quite.Not all conspiracy theories are equal. Although they have been around for millennia, just in my lifetime I have witnessed the unraveling of consequential conspiracies that exposed government lies about Vietnam, the power grab of Watergate, the Iran Contra arms scandal, and the deceits that led to the Iraq war. Government officials are not the only ones who scheme against the common good. The business world is littered with plots that have enriched executives at public expense. Big Tobacco, for instance, denied for decades that cigarettes caused cancer while simultaneously funding studies to obfuscate the lethal truth under a deluge of disinformation.The handful of real conspiracies, however, pales in insignificance to the flood of theories in a world exponentially enamored with the idea that the simple explanations merely hide far more byzantine and nefarious truths. That the world is run by secret societies is one of the oldest and most persistent beliefs, although those thought to be in charge has changed over time from the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Jews, to today’s globalist elites (the ‘global elites’ overlaps sometimes with ‘the Jews are to blame’.) One in four Americans believe there are dark plots “behind many things in the world.”As a U.C. Berkeley Political Science major, I am a natural skeptic. I don’t put a lot of faith in institutions. Even when the government tries to do something good, it often does so inefficiently. It cannot build a homeless shelter or a freeway extension on budget or on time. When it conspires to lie and work against the public interest, the truth might be slow to emerge, but it always does. Leaked files, whistleblowers, hacked email accounts, credible bits of evidence of what was supposed to stay secret, find their way into the public domain. Massive document dumps like the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, the Panama Files, and the Snowden leaks, highlight a lot of government and corporate wrongdoing. But there is not a single mention in those millions of documents about hiding space aliens, faking the moon landing, killing JFK, blowing up the World Trade Center, or stealing a presidential election.Researchers who study the psychology of conspiracy theories conclude that their spiraling popularity is the result of record levels of anxiety in contemporary society, coupled with widespread disenfranchisement and alienation. Conspiracy theories make a chaotic world seem more ordered and controllable. Ideas that years ago might have been the province of the tin foil hat fringe today make their way into the digital zeitgeist at warp speed. As innuendos, rumors, fake information, and a dose of AI, go viral, what used to percolate for years now takes only hours to gain momentum.That is especially true when it comes to history changing and unexpected events. Proportionality bias is the inclination to believe that big events must have big causes. People have no problem understanding that tens of thousands die annually in car wrecks. But when that person was Princess Diana in 1997, there was instant speculation about foul play. Instead of AIDS being a centuries-long natural evolution of a retrovirus from Africa it must have been the CIA deploying a bioweapon designed to kill inner city Blacks and gay men. No way that nineteen hijackers armed with box cutters pulled off 9/11. COVID could not have naturally jumped species from animals to humans in a wet market in China. It must have been a laboratory creation designed by governments and billionaires as a beta test run for controlling the population while censoring dissent under the guise of public health.Historian William Manchester wrote about proportionality psychology as it related to the JFK assassination:“If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime . . . you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals."But if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn't balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president's death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”Manchester’s last line highlights one of my basic rules: show me the evidence (it’s not an accident that my Substack is titled Just the Facts). Evidence is often in short supply. A lot of otherwise intelligent people find ways to rationalize their beliefs. They search for something, anything, that confirms their bias. Many suffer from what is called hindsight bias; knowing what happened lets people interpret evidence to fit their theory of how it happened. Trump supporters, for instance, think the Secret Service’s negligence on the day of the attempted Butler assassination was a convenient cover to hide a secret plot to kill the former president. Meanwhile, those who can’t stand Trump, refuse to believe there was a near death shot that only nicked his ear and were convinced the event was staged.Conspiracy theories seem like simple answers to difficult problems because most people do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. For instance, my last book, Pharma, was a history of the American pharmaceutical industry. I uncovered no shortage of drug company conspiracies that put profits ahead of patients. But some readers were disappointed that I did not conclude that vaccines caused autism. Many children diagnosed with autism received childhood vaccines. That is a correlation. But it does not provide the proof that one causes the other. The proof might be there one day, but it is not yet available.The proof cited frequently to support a conspiracy theory turns out to be something totally discredited, as with the falsified data in the medical journal relied on for the autism-vaccine connection, or is something that has been repeated so often it is widely accepted as true. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time someone unequivocally told me that the world’s greatest marksmen tried and failed to pull off the shooting sequence as Oswald did when he killed President Kennedy. The timing and accuracy of Oswald’s shots have been repeatedly reproduced. Still, the misinformation thrives.The absence of proof does not deter some theorists from speculating that the evidence of a conspiracy must exist somewhere, they just don’t know where. One Berkeley English professor invented the “negative template” to explain away a lack of proof. He posited that if someone is expecting to find information in a classified file, and it is not there when the file is released, that alone is “evidence” it was removed or destroyed by the conspirators.Investigative journalists operate with a different standard. A credible lead will sometimes have us hunting for even a shred of evidence. Last year, for instance, I spent a few frustrating months chasing a tip from a retired law enforcement officer about possible foul play in the death of Jeffrey Epstein. That Epstein was murdered to keep a lid on the sordid sexual secrets involving some of the world’s most powerful people is a certifiable conspiracy theory. It is something I thought unlikely but possible. The retired officer had been a reliable source for some of my past reporting. Ultimately, despite dozens of interviews and lots of hunting for documents, every promising avenue of inquiry proved fruitless. While I was left with concerns about what some of the prison staff did on the day Epstein died, I was convinced that he had killed himself. No media outlet was interested in publishing my dog bites a man story; they all wanted man bites a dog.In a rational world, no conspiracy theory, no matter how enticing, would survive without some credible evidence. But that does not matter in an era in which a lot of people get their news from Tik Tok. Chasing meritless conspiracy theories, I am often told, is harmless. That ignores that they sometimes produce dangerous consequences. After reading online in 2016, for instance, about a Washington, D.C.–area pizzeria that harbored young children as sex slaves as part of a Hillary Clinton-run child abuse ring, a 28-year-old father of two drove six hours with his AR-15 to rescue the children. No one was injured when he opened fire inside the restaurant. Not so lucky were the eleven killed and six injured at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. The gunman believed that a migrant caravan on its way to the U.S. was part of a Jewish plot to flood America with illegal immigrants.There is no clear marker for when healthy skepticism crosses over to conspiracy ideation. Often an underlying element of truth is perverted and expanded into a convoluted theory. It does not always take a lot for someone to leave the world of sanity to enter the province of Oliver Stone and Candace Owens. In the wake of October 7, for instance, there was plenty to criticize about Israel’s unprecedented intelligence failure to pick up advance notice of Hamas’s terror attack. Conspiracy theorists, however, followed the template of 9/11 truthers to go far beyond that. They turned the negligence and shortcomings of Israeli intelligence into a cunning plan designed to allow Hamas to pull off the attack to justify a military invasion of Gaza. Some florid anti-Israel zealots went a step further, contending it was the IDF who killed most Israelis on October 7 and denying Hamas targeted any civilians for murder and rape.I have written about October 7 denialism. It is as odious as Holocaust denial or the early twentieth-century Tzarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that posited a secret cabal of Jews controlled the world. Reason, logic and facts, however, cannot extinguish those or other theories. They thrive precisely because they fit an often-paranoid view of the world. Record levels of distrust of government and institutions reinforce them. The pervasive loss of faith feeds a sinister hypothesis that dark forces are constantly plotting to crush our freedoms. And a reflexive government response to major events that keeps important information secret and away from the public only feeds the sense that top officials have something to hide.Widespread public cynicism is exacerbated by a parallel sense of powerlessness. Analytical thinking and a demand for proof seems so yesterday. Many social media influencers claim to know the truth by intuition alone. The inferences and deductions and reliance on logic is their grandparent’s way of dissecting a problem. The most ambitious conspiracy theory only requires good instincts. And a common flaw is a tendency to interpret evidence against a theory as evidence for it. When JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, turned out to be a self-declared communist, many on the left thought that was evidence the plot must have been hatched by right wingers looking to frame the left. The fact that Biden won the presidential election was all the evidence election denialists needed to charge there had been massive voter fraud.Even hunches, however, need to stand up to common sense scrutiny. Many grand theories fail because of sheer impracticability. Dozens of events would have had to come together in a perfect patchwork or everything would unravel. Imagine how many conspirators would have been involved in planting explosive charges in the World Trade Center towers and remotely controlling the hijacked planes. What about stealing JFK’s corpse while it was being flown to an autopsy to do covert postmortem surgery that would frame Oswald as the shooter? Hundreds of conspirators would have had to keep the secret. No leak, no family discussion, no stray note or email, never once a guilty conscious or a death bed confession. That happens only in the movies.Disproving conspiracies is mostly a fool’s errand. It is impossible to convince a true believer out of even the craziest theory. It is analogous to convincing someone they joined a cult. People join groups they believe are good and somehow are blind to the truth that is abundantly clear to others. The “backfire effect” is what happens when refuting a conspiracy theory makes its proponents double down. I have learned that the hard way, over many heated discussions. My best arguments seldom ended with someone changing their minds. Instead, it often ends with me being accused of being part of the conspiracy. If a reasoned approach fails with most individuals, imagine the folly of winding back the clock once a society starts embracing a conspiratorial mindset. When social media influencers cash in on promoting conspiracies everywhere, the line between what is real and what is conspiratorial ideation is harder to judge than ever.Because I am a skeptic, I hear from a lot of people hoping to convince me they have the evidence of the next great conspiracy. Some of my best reporting about misdeeds and public corruption have come from those tips. However, I am still waiting for the ‘next Watergate.’ So are a lot of my readers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

My latest WSJ OpEd went live this evening online and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Here it is in full for Just the Facts subscribers (note: The VoiceOver for this article is an AI automated voice)Protecting women’s sports should be at the top of the Trump administration’s to-do list. The issue gained national attention in 2022, when male swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been ranked 65th among men in the nation for the 500-yard freestyle, won an NCAA swimming championship while competing as a woman. A United Nations report last month revealed that men identifying as women have won 890 medals in 29 female-only sports worldwide.The Education Department in April proposed a regulation adding “gender identity” as a protected category to Title IX rules. Title IX, enacted in 1972, bans sex discrimination by federally funded educational institutions. The new rule, which went into effect Aug. 1, allows males unfettered access to female locker rooms and bathrooms. It also signals approval of men participating in and dominating women’s athletics.Republicans tried unsuccessfully to pre-empt the Title IX changes. In 2023 the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” When it got to the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville—who began his career as a high-school girls’ basketball coach—asked for unanimous consent. Hawaii’s Sen. Mazie Hirono objected, saying it would bar people from playing sports “consistent with their gender.” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stymied the bill. In July Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R., Miss.) and Rep. Mary Miller (R., Ill.), introduced a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse the Biden regulation. It passed the House along party lines, 210-205. Mr. Schumer again made certain it died in the Senate.Federal courts blocked the Biden administration rule in 26 states. The Supreme Court upheld these injunctions and may eventually take up the new rule itself. The new Republican-controlled Congress could settle the matter quickly by passing a bill to reverse the Biden Title IX modifications. It would sail through the House, maybe even winning some support from Democratic representatives who saw the potency of the issue in the November election. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has said that his party is “out of touch” and that he doesn’t want his daughters playing in sports against males.New Senate Majority Leader John Thune could force Democrats to vote on the issue. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans will have 53, and the new Senate will have 10 members from states Donald Trump carried. Should the effort to restore Title IX stall in the Senate, Mr. Trump can issue an executive order barring institutions that receive federal funding from allowing male athletes to participate in athletic programs designed for girls and women. It will get tied up in litigation, but at least the federal government will be on the right side of the issue. The Trump administration should be at the forefront to restore fairness and demonstrate quickly that elections have real consequences for protecting women’s rights.Mr. Posner is author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

The brutal murder of UnitedHealth Group CEO, Brian Thompson, in the streets of Manhattan, has elicited widespread condemnation but also unleashed an online tsunami of celebratory memes and praise for the killer. The polarizing reaction has put a spotlight on the deep-seated animosity that many Americans harbor toward health insurance companies that often deny critical medical claims to protect profits. As they reject essential medical treatments, a corporate whistleblower recently provided me an internal health insurance policy that revealed they are also green-lighting expansive “gender affirming care” benefits for employees and their dependent children.Under Thompson's leadership, UnitedHealth had one of the industry’s highest rates of claim denials. A Senate subcommittee report from October found that the company denied requests for costly post-acute care at triple the rate of less expensive treatments. Worse, the insurer used an artificial intelligence-driven claims process with a 90% error rate in determining medical necessity. The industry-leading denial rate was good for shareholders but created a legion of angry patients who felt subordinated to the company’s bottom line profits. The backlash has prompted some insurers to reconsider controversial policies. Last week, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the country’s biggest insurers, announced it would halt a policy change that limited reimbursement for anesthesia during surgeries.Yes, you read that correctly. Anthem BCBS had quietly rolled out a policy in three states in which it set an “appropriate number of minutes” for surgical procedures and refused to pay for anesthesia that exceeded the limits. Complications that extended surgery times made patients responsible for the costs.The Anthem policy had survived nearly a year despite vociferous industry opposition from the American Society of Anesthesiologists. However, Anthem only backtracked following Thompson’s murder.I was acutely aware of the extent of the hypocrisy of Anthem’s ‘let’s limit reimbursement for surgical anesthesia’ since I had recently received from a whistleblower a copy of a corporate “LGBT+ Benefits Guide” from the same insurer. In the Anthem healthcare policy offered by Edward Jones, a Fortune 500 firm that is the largest U.S. financial services company in the number of financial advisors, it has a section titled “Transgender-inclusive health benefits.” “Our medical plan provides gender-affirming health benefits to associates and dependents who have a diagnosis of and meet Anthem’s clinical requirements for gender dysphoria.”The plan then lists what “gender-affirming care includes”* Hormone-replacement therapy including puberty blockers for youths (where allowed by law)* Reconstructive chest, breast and genital surgery.* Other services, such as facial feminization surgery, voice modification surgery, tracheal shave/thyroid reduction surgery, etc.”Edward Jones employees can qualify for “family-oriented and surgical recovery leave” for themselves, or “a loved one [who] receives gender-affirming surgery.”If an Edward Jones employee, or dependent, “must travel more than 50-miles from your home to receive in-network gender-affirming surgery because it’s not available in your area, our medical plan covers up to $50 per day for one person and $100 per day for up to two companions in travel and lodging expenses.”Who does Anthem list as “eligible dependents?* Legal spouse.* Edward Jones-recognized domestic partner* Children born to you, adopted by you or waiting to be adopted by you; stepchildren; children for whom you are the legal guardian; foster children; and children and stepchildren of your domestic partner.”Requests for comments from Anthem or Edward Jones went unanswered.As someone who has extensively covered corporate abuses in the healthcare industry, including in my 2020 book PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, I’ve documented countless ways in which profits are prioritized over patients. But the murder of UnitedHealth’s CEO has brought fresh attention to the role of private insurers in perpetuating public mistrust. With healthcare decisions, as in the case of Anthem, to prioritize gender-affirming care while dialing back on such basic needs as anesthesia for the full length of a surgery, it is little wonder that so many Americans feel abandoned by a system that seems increasingly designed to work against them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

Meta has kept secret a disturbing flaw in its systems by which cybercriminals exploit Instagram accounts for illegal activities, including running up charges on stolen credit cards and selling nonexistent products. The criminals exploit a weakness in Meta security by creating and linking fraudulent Instagram accounts to randomly selected legitimate Facebook profiles. This enables the hackers to mostly bypass Meta’s commerce eligibility criteria, the supposed safeguard before verifying an account for sales activities. The hackers then abuse their new accounts until Meta detects the fraud and shuts them down. However, by that time, the legitimate Facebook profiles linked to these hacked Instagram accounts are suspended or deleted in error.The result is that tens of thousands of Facebook users have unjustly had their accounts permanently deleted.What has been Meta’s response to this security issue? It has refused to address it.How do I know all this? I came to this story by a bit of personal serendipity. My wife, Trisha Posner, had thousands of friends and colleagues on her Facebook profile that she created in July 2007. This past June 13, Trisha got the notice (in the image at the top of this article) that her Facebook account was suspended “because your Instagram account lijaaketer533 doesn’t follow our rules. You have 180 days left to appeal. Log into your linked Instagram account to appeal our decision. Log into your Instagram account.”That was the first time Trisha had ever heard of an Instagram account with the username lijaakter533. She has her own Instagram accounts, a personal one under her own name, and another for our nonprofit, Antisemitism Watch. Both of those accounts were still operating.It was only when Trisha tried correcting her Facebook suspension that she immediately discovered that Meta had created a classic “Catch 22” that made it impossible to fix. Meta’s online help sends users in an endless circle of dead ends. And in this case, it only allowed an appeal to be made by the Instagram account that had violated its rules. However, since that Instagram account was created by some unknown cybercriminal, it was impossible for Trisha to access it to appeal her account suspension. Only the hacker knew that account's username and password. No matter what Trisha tried, Meta showed no interest in even acknowledging the problem, much less correcting it. Meta ignored every entreaty for a workaround. After signing up for Meta Verified on her personal Instagram account, chat representatives promised to investigate, but Trisha never heard back. She paid for Meta Pro Team support which also proved to be useless. Frustrated at Meta’s total stonewalling and unresponsiveness, Trisha filed a formal consumer complaint to the California Attorney General’s office.By this point, I got involved to determine whether Trisha’s experience was an isolated incident or part of a larger Meta problem. What I discovered was startling. I first came across FBDisabledMe, a subreddit with nearly 20,000 members many of whom had experienced the same problem: their Facebook accounts were first suspended and then ultimately deleted after hackers linked fraudulent Instagram accounts to their profiles. As with Trisha, those users had no way to appeal because only the hacker knew how to access the compromised Instagram account. After discovering FBDisabledMe, I reached out to others who would have more information. It included litigators who had fought Meta on other matters and had masses of discovery from the company, as well whistleblowers who had testified publicly about problems inside the company. Eventually, I was put in touch with a veteran software engineer who had personal knowledge of the problem that Trisha had stumbled into. According to that engineer, the 20,000 users on FBDisabledMe represented just a fraction of those affected. The real number of Facebook users who had fallen victim to the scam could be as high as 250,000. Meta’s security logs indicated that many of the affected Instagram accounts were linked to IP addresses from countries like Romania, Latvia, Belarus, and Moldova.Has Meta shared this information with Interpol or other law enforcement agencies? It is unclear since Meta refuses any public comment.Over the past week, I reached out several times to Meta’s press office for an official statement but received no response.Meta faces daily cybersecurity challenges. While it spends a lot of money on security, digital crooks are constantly probing to find weaknesses. It is troubling that Facebook will not acknowledge that this easily exploited vulnerability is leaving a trail of innocent victims who lose forever their accounts.In 2019, the FTC imposed a historic $5 billion penalty on Facebook (now Meta) and ordered the company to implement sweeping privacy requirements designed to boost transparency and accountability. What makes this issue even more egregious is Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent indifference. With over three billion users, he likely views the loss of 250,000 accounts as a minor inconvenience. Users who lose their accounts might simply create new ones, while others vent their frustrations on a subreddit that gets little attention from the tech or business press.There’s also the matter of Meta’s dismal approach to customer service. Last month, a woman named Tova Ridgway in Northern California, was so desperate to regain access to her hacked Facebook account that she drove to Meta’s headquarters. "They're like, 'I'm sorry, I can't do anything about this,” she told a local ABC affiliate. “Are you telling me you don't have anyone working for hacked pages?”“This happens every day,” a Facebook representative told her. “No, I'm sorry, there isn't.’”Ridgway found a solution through Meta Verified, a $15 a month subscription, something that did not work for Trisha. While that might work for some, it is an unjustified cost for users whose accounts were compromised due to Meta’s security flaws. Zuckerberg himself said in a blog post it would be too expensive for the company to recover and restore all hacked accounts. For a company that reported $39 billion in net profit last year, that justification rings hollow.Meta could and should be doing more to protect its users. The simplest solution for Trisha is restoring her Facebook account before it’s permanently deleted. But this goes far beyond her case. Tens of thousands of users like her—some of whom have lost years of business contacts, personal photos, and memories—are suffering because of Meta’s failure to address a critical security flaw.The most important step is for Meta to patch the security vulnerability that allows cybercriminals to manipulate Instagram accounts and cause collateral damage to Facebook users. Until that happens, it’s clear that Meta’s dismissive response to the growing problem of hacked accounts is not only inadequate but arrogant. That is never good for business in the long run. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media

The World Bank somehow lost track of upwards of $41 billion to fight climate change, about 40% of all its climate funding over the past seven years. The stunning disclosure was made public last week following an audit by Oxfam, the left-leaning British NGO focused on fighting worldwide poverty.The amount of missing money “could be twice or 10 times more,” according to a World Bank insider who asked for anonymity.Oxfam’s bombshell report outlined what might ultimately be an enormous public sector financial scandal. For those of you not familiar with the World Bank, it describes itself as “international development organization owned by 187 countries…that help developing nations advance their economies.” Five countries — the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Japan - are the bank’s major shareholders. Because the U.S. gives so much money to the World Bank, it is the only country that has a veto power on how it is run. The World Bank, with about $320 billion in capital, is supposed to distribute money to developing countries through low cost or zero-interest loans, grants, equity investments, and guarantees. The World Bank introduced a Climate Change Action Plan in 2016 at the direction of the U.S. and European countries that urged it to make fighting climate change an equal goal with eradicating poverty. The Bank revised its mission statement to “end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet.” By 2023, 41% of all the Bank’s financing to developing nations was directed to climate projects. Oxfam raised red flags — what it called “serious concerns” — that something was wrong when they began their audit of the Bank’s climate spending. It reviewed 181 climate projects the Bank had funded since 2017. “We had to sift through layers of complex and incomplete reports, and even then, the data was full of gaps and inconsistencies,” reported Kate Donald, the chief of Oxfam’s Washington D.C. office. “The fact that this information is so hard to access and understand is alarming —it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent.”The Bank could not account for somewhere between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate funds from the time they approved a project and the work was supposed to be completed. The World Bank did not know how the money it provided was used, not even if it was spent on the climate-initiatives for which it was earmarked. The Bank has “no single reliable source of data and information on [its] expenditures.” The lack of transparency, according to Oxfam, means “that it is impossible to verify the numbers that the Bank has reported as climate finance…”“All the figures are routinely made up,” a World Bank insider told the New York Post. “Nobody has a clue about who spends what.”Is the money missing because it was simply not accounted for by the countries that received it or did some of those tens of billions disappear into graft and corruption? That is impossible to determine because the World Bank is self-policing and not very forthcoming. Its Financial Integrity Unit is supposed to help developing nations build cases to pursue the illegal diversion of funds. And the Bank’s Office of Suspension and Disbarment (OSD) handles reports of fraud and corruption. The OSD refused my request to confirm or deny whether any of the unaccounted climate funds were the subject of an ongoing investigation.A private attorney in practice in Washington D.C., and who has helped NGO’s submit proposals for funding to the Bank, told me that, “It is a private fiefdom. They are not accustomed to much oversight.”If you have not heard about this story before this Just the Facts, that is not surprising. Although the Oxfam report was covered in the financial press by Bloomberg and Barrons, the leading MSM outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR, did not report on it. Nothing.Maybe that was because it was a money scandal involving climate change and the editors there thought that somehow sullied the underlying cause? I can’t figure out what today’s MSM editors consider newsworthy, but it is hard to imagine why they would not at least give some coverage to such a big story. Billions in missing taxpayer funds at a storied international institution should be front page news. Without widespread press coverage, the World Bank may never feel enough pressure to come clean with what really happened to all that money. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media