A federal case over peeling paint, an undercover agent outside a town hall, and an executive order on the childhood vaccine schedule. Three interventions in one week, each sold as freedom.
This government spent the past week reaching into the lives of three individual American citizens and hurling us all backward in time to when 1-4 children died before the age of 5.
The federal government spent seven weeks building a vandalism case against a 67-year-old retired Olympic canoeist because the president could not say out loud that his $14 million paint job failed. On Sunday, Trump conceded on Truth Social that there had been “some contractor error done by rushing the job for a July 4th opening,” which he waved off as relatively inconsequential and confined to a small patch. That concession came only after his own U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, dismissed the charges against David Hearn, her office having concluded that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool came from shoddy workmanship rather than vandals. Prosecutors wrote that the rush to finish produced hasty and botched work nobody fixed before the fencing came down. Trump’s response to his own prosecutor following the evidence was to say publicly that she choked and folded like an umbrella. The Hill + 2
There was never a case. The government’s own evidence pointed at the government’s own contractor, which is why Pirro reportedly walked into a White House meeting with a box of it and accused the Interior Secretary of misleading the president. David Hearn had finished a 52-mile bike ride, stopped at the memorial, and reached in to feel a piece of liner that was already peeling and still attached to the bottom. NBC4 Washington Newsweek
A D.C.-area veterinarian, Sophie Dennison-Gibby, was arrested after officers watched her pull two small pieces of liner from the water, and her lawyer says they also found ordinary trash in her purse, because she’d been picking that up too. A Swedish television reporter, Stina Blomgren, touched the surface while filming, and a National Guard member told her that if she did it again, she’d be detained. NBC News
You are free to visit your national monument. Reach into the water as a free citizen, and you get a federal charge and a soldier telling you not to do it again.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar sent an oversight letter after an undercover Homeland Security Investigations agent was found parked outside her monthly town hall in Richfield, Minnesota. A local officer noticed a woman in a Ford Explorer watching the building, ran the plates, and found they didn’t match the car. The woman first claimed she was event security, which Omar’s actual detail confirmed she was not, then said she was running an undercover drug operation nearby. Omar had already met with DHS in March about community reports of agents swapping license plates, which is illegal under Minnesota law, and says she was told the practice had ended. Her letter puts it plainly that, at worst, this feeds a growing concern the administration is using ICE to surveil political opponents. Yahoo! + 3
A congresswoman holding a monthly meeting with her constituents is the most ordinary thing in American civic life, and it now draws a federal agent in a car with illegal plates, explained to the officer who caught her as public safety, a drug operation, keeping people safe. That is bananas.
On Monday, the president signed an executive order reshaping the federal approach to childhood vaccines, cutting the number of recommended immunizations and advising that the MMR shot be separated into three individual shots. This one markets the wrapper instead of hiding it. Your child, your choice, packaged as parental freedom, and the order goes further, directing the Justice Department to investigate states in violation of exemptions for childhood vaccine mandates, including parental authority and religious and medical objection. The federal government is expanding its reach into your pediatrician’s office and calling it getting government out of your family. NBC News and The Hill
No individual MMR vaccines are FDA-approved or even available, and the CDC says no published evidence shows any benefit to separating them. Trump suggested at the signing that the combined shot can be “quite lethal.” Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician, said flatly that the order is wrong, that vaccines are safe and effective and do not cause autism. The pediatricians’ concern is the obvious one, that spreading shots across more visits makes it harder for parents to finish the schedule. CNBC + 3
Vaccine injury is real, and it is rare. Around 1900, thirty percent of all deaths in this country were children under five. By 1999, that figure was 1.4 percent. Before the measles vaccine, four to five hundred Americans died of measles every year, and roughly 48,000 were hospitalized; today that death count is close to zero. A century of American families clawing their way out of burying their children, now repackaged as a restriction you should want lifted. CDC and Axios
The freedom to touch a public monument costs you a federal charge. The freedom of a public safety operation costs an elected official her privacy. The freedom to decline a vaccine costs a child the protection that took a hundred years to build. They are pretending to support the first half of Live Free or Die while working to guarantee the second.
I said in the video that the Nazi state started with the Roma. That was wrong. Roma people were persecuted early and murdered in enormous numbers, but the first organized mass killing program the regime ran was Aktion T4, and its targets were disabled people. The correction matters for the same reason the parallel does. The state chose disabled people first because they were few, vulnerable, and cast as too “costly”. You establish that a government can decide some lives are a cost worth cutting, you start with the group nobody will defend, and then you widen the definition.
In states where abortion bans carry life-of-the-mother exceptions so narrow that physicians say they can’t act on them, a pregnant woman’s documented risk of death is a cost the state has decided it can absorb. A statistically minuscule vaccine risk is not. Same officials, same week, opposite math. Trans people, well under one percent of the population, have somehow been handed the bill for everything wrong with the country. The group is always chosen for being small enough that the rest of us might not make a fuss.
This is what’s on the ballot in November, and it’s the last off-ramp for two years. A midterm is how a country tells a president that the majority he thinks he has is not the majority he actually has. We’re going to need everyone willing to pull in the same direction, including the ones we find irritating, the ones we disagree with four times out of ten, the ones whose vibes we don’t like.
The house is on fire. Nobody in a burning house has ever been saved by a circular firing squad.
