What to Expect from Trump's Blitzkreig on Public Health: Part One
America's Descent into The Scam Economy
Previously, we reviewed the utterly repulsive and indefensible parade (PAI) of liberals lining up to endorse Trump's handpicked appointees to serious public health roles in the federal government. From naked endorsements to outright lying, it has become clear that many public health "experts" in academia and journalism are completely incapable of preparing the public for what is to come between January 2025 and January 2029, much less brave enough to explain to the opposition party that defending public health regulations is now one of their central priorities, and that the rebuilding of public health is now a key plank of the 2028 Democrat party platform.
The cowardice of the Biden Administration to reverse many of the terrible decisions of the first Trump administration has led to dire consequences, including widespread food contamination leading to outbreaks of listeria, (CDC) and a potential H5N1 pandemic (Reuters) on the horizon - left in the hands of dishonest, incompetent brats who have more experience grandstanding on social media instead of engaging with medical and scientific reality. These pseudointellectual grandstanders have more in line with professional wrestlers than respectable doctors & scientists and should be soundly rejected by Congress in their entirety.
The Urine Industrial Complex
To understand what to expect from the incoming Trump administration, one has to realize the central political and economic philosophy driving this utterly delusional crusade into what will be recorded in history as the time of American societal cyanide. The mainstream American economist view (largely a collection of thoughtless twits who get paid handsomely to grovel on their hands & knees before the wealthy & tell them how smart they are) is that federal regulations, in any format, are stifling economic growth and technological innovation. This is a childish, libertarian (but I repeat myself) view of economics that fails to realize the existence of the fundamentally dishonest, and permits bad actors to waste money, manpower, and resources on producing absolutely worthless trash at best, and outright harmful scams more often than not. For a prime example of this, let's turn to an April 2024 "Truth Social" (barf) post from Trump's pick for FBI director Kash Patel, a Q-Anon conspiracy theorist crank (WSJ) who has completely rotted his brain's ability to think critically or engage with reality thanks to conservative social media:
!["Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get health with [Warrior Essentials] - spikegangsters.com" Included is a graphic titled: "Spike Protein Recovery System: You were immune to the propaganda, but are you immune to the shedders? Warrior Essentials" featuring a photo of a generic supplement gel capsule.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa4fe38db-4d9e-4ec3-a5ce-60a7c32d47f6_680x768.png "\"Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get health with [Warrior Essentials] - spikegangsters.com\" Included is a graphic titled: \"Spike Protein Recovery System: You were immune to the propaganda, but are you immune to the shedders? Warrior Essentials\" featuring a photo of a generic supplement gel capsule.")
The unregulated supplements industry is a total blight on the American economy and public health, which often produces little more than expensive piss getting flushed into the ocean, but this "Spike Gangsters" shit is an especially egregious scam. (Twitter) You cannot "detox" mRNA, nor "reverse" the COVID-19 vaccine and "get healthy." Many of the worst cases of Long COVID disability are from people who were infected by SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, long before a vaccine was widely available, and no - they are not feeling "healthy" at all. More bizarrely, the messaging of Patel's post directly contradicts the graphic, which is directly targeted to the unvaccinated and claims they are "immune to the propaganda" that a deadly & disabling virus which has ruined the lives of millions is harmless, but it's the vaccine that's throwing people into mass, unmarked graves. Warrior Essentials is also dabbling in a depraved, utterly paranoid conspiracy theory that the vaccinated are "shedding" the COVID-19 vaccine and killing the unvaccinated. In reality, it's unmitigated infections with SARS-CoV-2 (PAI) that are sabotaging their health, and not a single unregulated supplement sold on a social media platform dedicated to peddling hate can help you with that.
This product is a total scam - and the people responsible for producing and selling it should be thrown in prison, along with "influencers" such as Kash who took brand deals to peddle this trash on social media. The Biden Administration wasting the past four years not cracking down on garbage like this has made our economy and the public's health fundamentally weaker by permitting these sorts of scams to run wild in their "post-pandemic" fantasy - but in the minds of their handpicked experts like Ashish Jha and Emily Oster, cracking down on scam products such as this and "raw" milk, which take advantage of the general public's ignorance, is suggesting "the public can't handle nuance." The dominant liberal view is that we are "rebuilding trust in public health" by "treating the public as adults," which apparently includes letting them be ripped off and having their health sabotaged by scam artists.
Unregulated supplements have long been a serious moneymaker for quacks and cranks that peddle conspiracy theories and hate speech on social media - Alex Jones and his InfoWars goobers like Paul Joseph Watson would frequently rant about how "soy" was turning America's men into sissified femboys, only to sell “Brain Force” supplements that...contain heavy amounts of that dirty, dirty, feminizing soy. Anti-vax scam artist and potential future Secretary of Health & Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also made a killing peddling unregulated supplements via Mercola to his dedicated following. Potential future head of the National Institute of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, hired anti-vax social media crank Kevin Bass to his anti-vax media platform "The Illusion of Consensus" after Bass was expelled from medical school for sexual misconduct (PAI) - Bass also peddled unregulated supplements to his Substack audience. (PAI) There are no FDA regulations that ensure these supplements actually contain the substances on the label, contain an accurate amount of listed ingredients, or do not include illegal additives. In other words, these are all scam artists. (JAMA)
Simon Goddek once had a promising career in the science of growing underwater plants, until he decided that being a depraved, abusive anti-vax quack on social media was more important. Now he misrepresents himself as a "Dr.," peddling specially branded Vitamin D supplements - which are worthless - and is often endorsed by future unelected bureaucrat and head of a depraved "Department of Government Efficiency," Elon Musk, who frequently relies upon government handouts whilst peddling overpriced scam products to the public - a shitty, inefficient subway sold as a "Hyperloop," (Youtube) a butane torch wrapped in an airsoft shell and sold as a "flamethrower", water for Flint, and yes, even a six-figure truck that has a laundry list of defects (Reddit) across the entire vehicle, down to the cupholders (Reddit). Truly, a paragon of business efficiency.
The best way to describe the next four years? It's simple: America is going all in on The Scam Economy.
A Condensed History of The Scam Economy
The fundamental economic worldview of the incoming Trump administration, and many liberal economists such as Emily Oster, is that the federal government exists solely to facilitate the generation of corporate profit. Any sort of enforcement of federal regulations is a net negative that stifle economic innovation & growth, and by allowing “entrepreneurs” to waste manpower, money, and resources on producing fraudulent products to exploit the public, you’re in fact making the dollar stronger.
Right-wing blowhards have waged a long crusade to build this reality, through groups such as AIER, which produced the scientifically illiterate and utterly amoral “Great Barrington Declaration,” or the Federalist Society and their hack Jenin “LeftyLockdowns” Younes, who saw the mass death of the COVID-19 pandemic and saw an ample opportunity to forward their agenda of crippling federal public health regulations and regulatory authority in all its forms. With the incoming Trump Administration, the American economy is about to swallow a cyanide pill.
In the satirical 1986 book The Pentagon Catalog, by veterans Christopher Cerf & Henry Beard (which includes a FREE nut - MSRP $2,043 - with purchase), the duo provide a tongue-in-cheek but accurate look at how arms manufacturers have long been scamming the American taxpayer - with full approval from the federal government, which has to this day, refused to audit the Pentagon. In the mid 1980s, the American taxpayer's dollar could take you places: $435.00 for a claw hammer, $640 for a toilet seat, $659 for a spring-loaded ashtray specially designed for the E-2C spyplane, a $382 "No Smoking" light for the C-5 cargoplane, and to top it all off: $74,165 for a goddamned *ladder.* After the Kuwaiti ambassador convinced his daughter to fool the American public into falsely believing that the Iraqi Republican Guard were murdering babies in the NICU (an atrocity that American ally the Israeli military would carry out in 2024 with full USA approval), the first Gulf War was on! Americans sitting at home watching CNN could see their tax dollars put to hard work, as an unyielding stream of explosions &carnage was broadcast live on 24/7 cable news.
The late comedian Bill Hicks would remark upon this in his 1991 special Relentless:
"…Couldn't we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?"
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton attempted to beef up his "fiscal conservative" chops by firing a bunch of federal employees... only to replace them with private contractors, spending more of the American taxpayer's money for a worse product. However, this was private profit instead of federal employees getting health insurance, 401ks, and pensions - so this inefficient boondoggle was seen as a net positive for the economy. Keep this factoid in the back of your mind for later.
The defense industry and their pet "think-tanks" (double barf) had developed a new scam in the 2000s as part of Dubya's "Global War on Terror," one in which the American taxpayer would foot the bill for trillions of dollars, and the American military would facilitate the open pillaging of Middle Eastern nations by private contractors in an outrageous scam referred to as "nation building." Let's put it simply: there's a reason that former McKinsey Consulting creep and Secretary of Transportation (whose only experience in this field was getting a young Black child killed as mayor) Pete Buttigieg has a "minerals map" of Afghanistan on his living room wall. (Vogue) Shockingly, liberal pundits - many of which who endorsed the invasion & occupation of Iraq - never bothered to interrogate the feasibility of this proposed "nation building" scam by asking a simple question:
How precisely is Staff Sgt. Jane Bumfuck from Turd Valley, OH - who has likely never held a meaningful relationship with a single Arabic-speaking person in her entire life - "spreading democracy" by sexually humiliating a random taxi driver in torture camps such as Abu Ghraib? All the while, private contractors such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton were making a financial killing doing half-assed work, producing non-functioning infrastructure, all paid for by you. At one point, a man became an overnight millionaire by rebranding a "golf ball radar" gag gift as a bomb detector and selling it to Iraqi & Afghani police and militaries. (BBC) He was one of the few scam artists that were actually punished, but the American taxpayer would be forced to watch countless billions of their money vanish into a void on sham projects designed to fail. (Yahoo)
On the domestic front of the Bush years, Wall Street had devolved into a dedicated chaos engine of infinite fraud, crashing the global economy. Adam Curtis and a bunch of big names from Hollywood made an excellent film about this called The Big Short. One minor tidbit left out of the film is how major banks such as Wells Fargo had departments dedicated to producing fraudulent foreclosure papers, (Democracy Now) given to armed police, so these banks could steal the homes of countless millions of Americans. When one employee reported this to Wells Fargo's internal whistleblower hotline, she was soundly fired. All the while, millions of Americans were tuning into a reality gameshow titled "The Apprentice," basking in the glory of alleged business genius Donald Trump: a narcissistic scam artist obsessed with the sound of his own voice. There would certainly be zero negative consequences to giving this sicko a national media platform painting him in a positive light - none at all.
Even in this grim moment of chaos and corruption, it wasn't too late to turn things around. All you needed was one political party brave enough to enforce the law.
How Public Health Falls By The Wayside
January 21st, 2009, should have marked the end of a dark era in American history: A historic campaign effort, packed to the brim with young 18-and-20 somethings across the country knocking on doors, carrying a vision for a brighter, bolder future out of the horrors of the Dubya administration, led the Democrats to a historic victory. With war criminals racking up a list of atrocities abroad & financial criminals wrecking the economy at home, a Democrat supermajority had a significant mandate to crack some skulls, upload the law, and repair the damage that had been done - building a decades long foundation to hold power, kneecapping the Republicans, and keeping Wall Street on a short leash whilst putting an end to senseless militaristic adventurism.
When it came to prosecuting the atrocities in the Middle East, including torture, the Obama Administration insisted "we are looking forward, not backward" (Dan Froomkin) whilst expanding their military operations and keeping torture camps like Guantanamo Bay open. When it came to prosecuting the financial criminals responsible for crashing the global economy, Obama and Biden insisted that doing so would "further destabilize the economy." (InTheseTimes) This was such a masterstroke of fourth-dimensional political chess, that the Democrats would go on to lose 1000+ seats nationwide and get Donald Trump elected President over the next eight years.
The foundations of The Scam Economy had been laid, and a new era had begun with a bi-partisan consensus: the only legitimate power is private power, and the deployment of public power against wealthy interests - even when it comes to prosecuting outright criminal behavior - was a disgusting vulgarity. The Obama years of 2009-2017 were the genesis of two central pillars of the modern Scam Economy: Crypto "currency" scams and Silicon Valley's war against labor laws and regulatory authority.
In reaction to Wall Street crashing the global economy, the birth and rise of "Bitcoin" and other crypto "currencies" (These are not money. They are commodities.) became a sort of techno gold rush amongst insufferable internet libertarians - and was primarily used to facilitate the sale of illicit drugs and child pornography, when not being used to facilitate money laundering and naked scams, such as "Non-fungible tokens" and "the Metaverse." Delusions of "digital ownership" fooled countless marks into believing that they could introduce scarcity to The Internet, a digital superhighway that facilitates the liberation of information.
Instead of protecting the general public from this new age of financial exploitation, the Democrats thought they could win the White House in 2024 by promising to "protect Black men's crypto investments." This did not end well.
Much more prominently a feature of American life from 2009-17 was the rise of "startup culture" and the app-based "sharing economy," openly embraced by the Obama-Biden Administration - which even launched "learn to code" initiatives in the hopes of driving down software engineer salaries - and was little more than a bare-naked crusade against labor laws and federal regulations, with taxi companies like Uber and hotel companies such as AirBNB misclassifying themselves as "technology companies" in order to circumvent the law under the guise of "innovation."
Americans found themselves being shifted out of steady jobs with workplace safety regulations, 401ks, and retirement plans - and into leasing an Uber they sleep in when they're not driving back and forth for 16 hours a day, begging for "five stars" from complete strangers in order to maintain an income. Economic reporting does not factor in how the latter job is clearly much lower quality than the former, leaving laptop class pundits such as Will Stancil or Dean Baker, who have never gotten their hands dirty, much less ever worked a real job, going into extended public meltdowns when the public voices their discontent with the economy.
When around half of the rising homeless population in America has a job, and the solution of the supposedly "left-wing" political party is letting creeps like Gavin Newsom, London Breed, and Eric Adams deploy militarized police to vanish these people from the public eye, including many who were disabled by “mild” COVID-19, it's pretty clear that the fundamentals of the economy aren't nearly as strong as what the pundit brain-trust declare. Luckily, the opposition party has their priorities in order - voting overwhelmingly to make anti-communist propaganda a mandatory part of public education, whilst over 10% of students in the richest city in America are homeless, (WSWS) showing the robust strength of the American free-market economy and its ability to provide for our children.
All of these factors have contributed to the steady decline of public health in America, with medical bills still being the leading cause of bankruptcy. Countless millions of Americans have had their health upended by “mild” bouts with COVID-19, with many losing the ability to work, falling into poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair - only to be abandoned and terrorized under bipartisan consensus. Unregulated supplements and other scams will have free reign to prey upon this untapped market of millions under Trump & RFK - with “legitimate” doctors like Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya insisting that they are merely suffering from “mental illness.”
The destruction of financial stability and federal regulatory authority, leaving countless Americans feeling that they'll never own a home, much less be able to raise a family, or ever retire - was the fundamental purpose of the rise of the tech industry and your "app-based" luxury economy. Even as the Democrat Party gave their unyielding loyalty to Silicon Valley, letting countless laws and regulations go out the window, these creeps all turned out to be bloodthirsty white nationalist scam artists: from Marc Andreessen (Twitter), to Peter Thiel, to Elon Musk, and many others, who all rallied against protecting the public from SARS-CoV-2. These are nothing more than lecherous, hateful vermin who provide nothing of value to society, much less the economy, and should be utterly crushed & humiliated. Instead, the Democrat Party let Uber's chief legal officer shape Presidential campaign messaging in 2024 - handing the federal government, and millions of American families who were devastated by Biden's failed pandemic response, to a depraved round table of exploitative sadists.
The Scam Economy wasn’t built overnight - it took decades of whittling away at public institutions, empowered by gullible liberals. Now, The Scam Economy will no longer be overseen by naive enablers. The Scam Economy will now be helmed by the rabies-infected vultures. So just what will public health look like under the next four years of Trump and his handpicked charlatans, and how will COVID-19 thrive under the bi-partisan consensus of learning to love the virus? With the threat of future pandemics on the horizon, will a second Trump Administration finally drive America off the edge of a cliff?
You can find Part 2: Pestilence, Fraud, and Decay here.
