The Doctor Who Made Kentucky Sicker

Rand Paul’s Pandemic of Bullshit

WHITE ROSE | AUGUST 1, 2026

Rand Paul enjoys introducing himself as “Doctor” whenever the title gives his political opinions the faint aroma of medical authority. The public should read the fine print.

Paul is an ophthalmologist, not an epidemiologist, virologist, immunologist, pulmonologist, infectious disease specialist, or public health physician. He was trained to treat diseases of the eye. During COVID, however, he repeatedly presented himself as though examining corneas had somehow qualified him to overrule the accumulated expertise of the world’s infectious disease community.

Even his professional credentials contain a characteristically Rand Paul footnote. After allowing his certification from the recognized American Board of Ophthalmology to expire, Paul relied upon certification from the National Board of Ophthalmology, an organization he created himself. Its officers included his wife and father-in-law. It was not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties, and the experiment eventually collapsed. Rand Paul did not merely distrust the establishment. He built his own establishment and placed himself at the top of it.

That episode tells us quite a bit about the man. When a legitimate institution refuses to validate Rand Paul on his preferred terms, his instinct is not self-examination. His instinct is to declare the institution corrupt, create an alternative authority, and certify himself correct.

COVID gave him a national stage for the same performance.

Paul opposed mask requirements on public transportation. He pushed to overturn vaccination, testing, and masking requirements for Senate pages. He described school masking as “mask theater” and publicly claimed that, for healthy young people, vaccine risks could exceed the risks of COVID. He repeatedly framed basic public health precautions as government fearmongering rather than imperfect attempts to reduce infection, hospitalization, disability, and death.

Some of his individual observations contained slivers of truth. Cloth masks were less effective than well-fitted respirators. Previous infection did provide some immunity. Young people generally faced lower risks than the elderly. Public health officials sometimes communicated poorly and changed recommendations as evidence developed.

Paul’s trick was to extract each uncertainty from its context and turn it into an argument against collective action. A less effective mask became a useless mask. Lower risk became no meaningful risk. Evolving scientific guidance became evidence of dishonesty. A vaccine that did not prevent every infection became a failed vaccine.

That is not scientific skepticism. Scientific skepticism asks whether the evidence is strong enough and adjusts its conclusions when better evidence arrives. Paul’s version begins with an ideological conclusion, cherry-picks whatever evidence appears useful, and treats every correction as proof of conspiracy.

Kentucky provides an uncomfortable setting for Paul’s victory lap.

The state’s early pandemic record was not uniformly disastrous. Governor Andy Beshear declared an emergency on March 6, 2020, instituted restrictions, expanded testing, issued county-level warnings, and held regular public briefings. By October 2021, Kentucky’s cumulative COVID death rate remained close to the national average, although its infection rate was already about 17 percent higher.

The later picture became considerably uglier.

CDC mortality data published in 2026 show Kentucky with an age-adjusted COVID death rate of 11.1 per 100,000 for the reported year, compared with 7.2 in Michigan, 6.3 in California and Wisconsin, 6.9 in New York, and 5.7 in Colorado and Utah. Among the states listed, only West Virginia’s rate was slightly higher at 11.2. Kentucky’s rate was roughly 50 percent higher than Michigan’s and nearly double Colorado’s.

Those deaths cannot honestly be placed on the shoulders of one senator. Kentucky entered the pandemic with serious disadvantages, including chronic illness, poverty, rural hospital limitations, smoking, obesity, and unequal access to care. Beshear, not Paul, directed the state government’s response. Personal behavior, vaccination levels, new variants, federal policy, local politics, and existing health conditions all affected the result.

Paul nevertheless helped shape the environment in which Kentuckians made life-or-death decisions. He supplied respectable-sounding language to people who wanted to believe that masks were oppression, vaccination was more dangerous than disease, and epidemiologists were merely bureaucrats protecting their power. He converted public health into another tribal loyalty test.

That matters. A senator cannot spend years undermining preventive medicine and then wash his hands when the people he represents suffer unusually high mortality. He cannot market suspicion as courage, call resistance “freedom,” and pretend the resulting body count belongs entirely to someone else.

Paul now presents himself as the great inquisitor of the pandemic, particularly when Anthony Fauci is seated beneath the television lights. Fauci is not beyond criticism. No public official should be. Decisions involving school closures, research funding, masking guidance, vaccine communication, and the origins of the virus deserve serious examination.

Paul is not conducting serious examination.

He is staging a prosecution in search of a crime. His hearings have become exercises in insinuation, interruption, semantic traps, and made-for-social-media outrage. The goal is rarely to discover what happened or improve the next pandemic response. The goal is to place Rand Paul in the heroic role of the lone doctor exposing the corrupt medical empire.

The costume does not fit.

Fauci spent a career studying infectious disease. Paul spent the pandemic studying how infectious disease could be converted into political content.

The most revealing question is therefore not whether Fauci was always right. He was not. The question is whether Rand Paul made the public more capable of understanding COVID, evaluating risk, and protecting vulnerable neighbors.

He did not.

He made people angrier. He made them more suspicious. He made scientific uncertainty sound like fraud and basic precautions sound like tyranny. He treated every microphone as an examining room, every disagreement as malpractice, and every dead Kentuckian as somebody else’s responsibility.

Rand Paul may be qualified to examine Kentucky’s eyes.

Its COVID record suggests he should stop pretending he can see the whole patient.

#WhiteRose #RandPaul #Kentucky #COVID19 #PublicHealth #MedicalMisinformation #PandemicPolitics #Fauci #Accountabilit

 

SENATOR RAND PAUL, AND EVERY SINGLE SENATOR IN THE DR. ANTHONY FAUCI HEARING, HAVE ALL BEEN VACCINATED, WITHOUT ONE SINGLE EXCEPTION, AND SO WERE ALL THEIR CHILDREN AND THEIR GRANDCHILDREN... WITHOUT EXCEPTION!  

EVERY.    SINGLE.    ONE. 

Here's what MAGA needs you to forget while they re-litigate 2020: Trump wasn't a bystander to the response they hate.

He was directing it — loudly.

"Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we'd have 500,000 deaths."
"People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots."

That's Trump in October 2020, on a campaign call reporters were allowed to hear.

Six months earlier, he'd retweeted "Time to # FireFauci."

So the record shows Trump overruling, undermining, and attacking his own top infectious disease doctor in real time — and his party spending the five years since prosecuting the doctor for the results.

Same logic on the election.

The 2020 vote was administered while Trump ran the DOJ, the DHS, and the FBI. If it was stolen, it was stolen from the man in charge of stopping exactly that — by agencies he appointed.

Every 2020 grievance is a confession.

They're not investigating a failure.
They're investigating their own boss.
And they're praying you won't notice.
 

8/31/2026

Donald Trump's aides "rushed the press" out of the Oval Office after one of his speeches sparked fears that "something was wrong", it's been claimed. The President addressed reporters on multiple topics at the White House yesterday (July 30), discussing matters including the conflict in Iran, his recent sit-down with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his desire to "end the war" in Ukraine.

However, the briefing took an unusual direction when Trump, whose marriage to Melania is at its lowest point due to a 'disturbing' reason, shifted focus to domestic matters. He went off on a tangent about his administration "changing all the grass in all the parks" before making the peculiar comparison that grass is like "human beings".

It led to what one observer characterized as a hasty effort to remove attendees from the scene. It comes after Karoline Leavitt accidentally humiliated Trump as critics asked about his 'diaper'.

• Melania Trump's aide shares what she was doing as she snubbed Lindsey Graham's funeral

• Reflecting Pool track marks revealed in new aerial shots after Trump's motorcade error

Political commentator David Pakman explained how the address grew increasingly perplexing in what he termed a "strange chapter in the novel that is this insane presidency". He stated: "They suddenly realised something was wrong with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and they rushed the press out."

US-POLITICS-TRUMP © Getty

During his YouTube program, The David Pakman Show, he later commented: "As it became clear to the aides in the room that Donald Trump was starting to decompensate, and he simply couldn't do it anymore, the bevvy of aides who mostly have the same look, I don't know if like, am I not supposed to notice that the aides have a very similar look? They just rush reporters out of the room."

He noted they seemed to be attempting to "very quickly" move people the "hell out of there". In the footage, Trump abruptly thanked those present, indicating the meeting's conclusion, before two aides positioned themselves directly before the cameras.

As the shot zoomed out, two female staff members made urgent gestures with their arms, directing the press to exit. While reporters hastily left, Trump and his colleagues remained visible in the background, maintaining polite smiles.

Earlier in the meeting, Trump stated: "Grass is like human beings. Grass is a life also. And we're changing. We're raking, cleaning and changing all of the parks. We don't have people."

President Trump Makes Announcement With Secretary Of Transportation Sean Duffy In The Oval Office © Getty

He continued: "We don't have the tents anymore. We don't have all the barbed wire up. We don't have the wire up."

Trump then pivoted to border security, windmills and his proposals to overhaul Dulles Airport in Virginia. For David, this final subject proved especially perplexing, describing it as a "bizarre and demented word salad".

Trump stated: "Within a few years, it will be rated the best airport in the country. So it's going to be so efficient. Right now, it's totally inefficient between the trams and the Star Wars thing that they go up.

"The Star Wars and elevated buses and nobody knows what's going on. It's a real mess."

His nod to George Lucas's sci-fi classic Star Wars seems directed at the shuttle transport operating at Dulles. Dubbed "people movers" these vehicles have reportedly drawn the POTUS's ire and been likened to vehicles from the iconic franchise.

It comes after disrespectful Trump was slammed for a 'disgusting' act during Lindsey Graham's funeral.

 

 Last week Republicans took the final steps toward destroying what's left of U.S. media consolidation laws. It didn't warrant much attention by the press; in part because corporate consolidation has been deadly for U.S. journalism already.

Republicans and their media arm(s) have two unsubtle goals: massive consolidation among right wing local broadcast companies, and the befuddlement of the U.S. electorate by way of propaganda pretending to be useful local TV news.

The Trump administration has been taking specific aim at the National Television Ownership Rule, which is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the U.S.

They're doing this to the benefit of Nexstar Media Group and Tegna, who combined own more than 330 local TV news stations. Both companies have a history of kissing Donald Trump's ass, and are pursuing a $6.2 billion merger giving the new, bigger company dominion over more than half of U.S. households.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been telling right wing propaganda websites this is all necessary to "restore balance" in media. Carr's announcement falsely claims he's looking to restore trust in media...by ensuring local broadcast TV news is dominated by a small handful of Trump-friendly broadcasters.

Carr's fellow Democratic FCC Commissioner, Anna Gomez, was quick to point out that this is technically theft of purportedly publicly-owned airwaves. And because Congressional law demands the FCC enforce media consolidation limits, the whole thing is brazenly illegal:

“This unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. A free and diverse media landscape depends on real limits on how much of the public airwaves any one company can control, and this FCC is now poised to allow local broadcasters to sell those airwaves off to the highest bidder."

 

Remember laws? Adorable.

Despite the 39% cap, TV broadcast news was already in trouble, thanks to the steady erosion of media ownership limits first mandated by Congress in 1941, and steadily eroded by corporate power and corruption ever since.

The sector is dominated by a handful of companies all owned by affluent right wing old white men, and their local "TV news" output consists of sloppy infotainment and the sort of right wing propaganda that pummels local communities with crime, homelessness, and drug abuse fear mongering.

Sinclair Broadcasting, for example, routinely airs anything from white-supremacy-friendly garbage to dangerous right wing health disinformation. When the company took over Seattle's ABC affiliate KOMO in 2018, the station's employees, disgusted by "must run" propaganda segments, began running for the exits.

Nexstar's local broadcast affiliates – and it's terrible Newsnation cable TV channel – routinely find themselves under fire for for the same behavior. Both Nexstar and Sinclair recently proved themselves very eager to help Trump demolish the First Amendment and censor comedians critical of the Presidency.

A fair assumption is that once Nexstar is allowed to buy Tegna, they'll move on to merge with Sinclair Broadcasting, putting the near-entirety of local broadcast TV under the control of right wing zealots loyal to Trumpism (or whatever unholy authoritarian iterations are belched forth in the decades to come).

Academics have been warning about this for decades, but this eight-year-old viral Deadspin video was arguably the most effective in demonstrating how local U.S. broadcast "news" has become a homogenized, bobble-headed infotainment and agitprop sewer where useful local journalism goes to die:

click to watch on YouTube

Deadspin has, I should point out, long-since been acquired and run into the ground by private equity.

Less real local journalism creates local news deserts, where there's less attention paid to local corruption or abuses by consolidated corporate power. In 2019, I spoke to researchers documenting how the supplanting of local journalism with right wing propaganda measurably swings election outcomes.

I often see a prevailing sentiment that this sort of thing doesn't matter because "nobody watches regular TV anymore," but that's simply not true. 65% to 70% of U.S. adults (roughly 170–180 million people) still at least occasionally watch local TV broadcasts via cable, antenna, satellite, or streaming.

That's 180 million households consuming lazy right wing propaganda in a country endlessly confused as to why such a large segment of the electorate routinely votes against their best self interests. The output of these local broadcasts is also tethered to national media and internet news sources, allowing the right wing to manufacture entire bogus news and outrage discourse cycles at will.

And this is just local news.

We're not even talking about Fox News, arguably the most successful modern media propaganda machine ever constructed. Or Twitter, which is now Elon Musk's personal right wing propaganda website. Or TikTok, which is now co-owned by Trump's billionaire ally Larry Ellison, who is also gobbling up networks like CBS and CNN with the unsubtle goal of replacing what was left of soggy corporate journalism with something arguably worse.

Then of course you have Breitbart, Dally Caller, The Daily Wire, the New York Post and the endless other right wing propaganda ops pretending to do useful journalism. And who can ignore the way U.S. oligarchs are buying papers like the Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, and LA Times to pummel us with oligarch-friendly gibberish.

With scattered exception, Democrats have been a feckless disaster when it comes to media policy and reform. Not only have they not had a cogent media reform plan anytime in the last quarter-century, establishment dems can't even effectively communicate the fact that there's an information war going on.

A war in which journalism, education, science, and informed consensus are losing, badly. Most Democrats can be found paying empty lip service to journalism before rubber-stamping the next terrible merger, and traditionally have treated competent media regulation as a droll and unnecessary afterthought.

Assuming we can unfasten Trump's fangs from the neck of democracy, media reform is going to be absolutely essential if the country doesn't want to enjoy repeated, ongoing bouts with corporatocracy and fascism, culminating in the country splintering into a broken coagulation of bickering nation states.

Such reform has to center around restoring media consolidation limits, imposing media ownership diversity requirements, rebuilding our demolished public broadcasting systems, embracing meaningful antitrust reform, and establishing tougher new media literacy standards (Finland starts teaching children to spot propaganda and unreliable narrators as early as three-years-old).

A cornerstone of modern right wing power is propaganda, and if we can't muster a coherent response to right wing information warfare, we're going to be stuck under the boot heel of the dumbest, greediest motherfuckers imaginable, indefinitely.

 

Ted Cruz went on Fox News to warn America about corrupt rulers who get rich by robbing the people they govern, and somehow made it through the entire speech without noticing he was describing the billionaire sitting in the Oval Office.

The setup was an attack on Zohran Mamdani, New York's new mayor, whom Cruz promoted from socialist to Marxist to "full-on communist" in the space of one breath.

Then came the thesis. Castro was a billionaire. Putin is a billionaire. The men who run these regimes, Cruz explained, always end up rich, because they steal and rob from the people they govern.

Here is the part Cruz forgot to check. Donald Trump's personal fortune has climbed by more than two billion dollars since he moved back into the White House last year, roughly doubling from around two billion to over five in a single year.

More than a billion of that came from crypto. Not from building anything real. From a memecoin with his name stamped on it.

Trump collects a fee every time that coin changes hands. Up or down, boom or crash, he gets paid on the transaction itself. The price is the buyer's problem, never his.

And the buyers came. Around 764,000 crypto wallets took losses on $TRUMP while the man himself banked the fees, according to reporting in the New York Times. Ordinary people who trusted the name handed their savings to a president quietly skimming off the top of every trade.

This is not a line from the left. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, no one's idea of a communist cell, accused Trump and his family of cashing in on the presidency in a way that shames the office.

So when Cruz stood on Hannity's set and carefully defined a leader who uses power to enrich himself while the people beneath him grow poorer, he was not describing Mamdani, whose great crime was proposing a tax on second homes and cheaper groceries.

He was describing the man he has spent a decade defending. The same man who branded him "Lyin' Ted" and insulted his wife to his face.

A staffer for Gavin Newsom watched the clip and left a line Cruz will never shake loose: not self-aware enough to realize what he just admitted.

Cruz wrote the indictment himself, read it into the camera, and handed it to the wrong defendant.

 

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has sparked one of the fastest-growing grassroots movements in the United States. Across the country, communities are pushing back against the construction of massive AI data centers, arguing that the projects consume enormous amounts of electricity and water while bringing relatively few permanent jobs.

What started as isolated local disputes has evolved into a nationwide movement involving residents, farmers, environmental groups and local officials from across the political spectrum. In many communities, people are raising concerns about increased pressure on power grids, water resources, farmland and quality of life.

According to recent reporting, hundreds of citizen groups have organized campaigns against proposed AI data centers, with opposition emerging in states across the country. Some projects have been delayed, scaled back or cancelled after strong public resistance and local government action.

The issue has become increasingly bipartisan. Conservatives have argued that local communities should have greater control over development decisions, while many progressives have focused on environmental impacts and infrastructure demands. As a result, opposition to large-scale AI infrastructure is becoming an important issue in state and local politics.

Technology companies argue that expanding data center capacity is essential for maintaining America's leadership in artificial intelligence. They say new facilities are needed to power AI innovation, economic growth and future technological development. Many companies have also pledged investments in new energy infrastructure and efficiency improvements to address community concerns.

Political analysts believe the debate over AI data centers could play a role in upcoming elections, particularly in states where major developments are planned. While it is too early to say the movement will decide the midterm elections, it has clearly become a significant political issue that candidates and lawmakers can no longer ignore.

As artificial intelligence continues to transform the economy, the debate over where—and how—America builds the infrastructure that powers it is likely to remain at the center of national politics for years to come.

Sources: The New York Times, The Week, Tom's Hardware, Barron's.

 

 This story broke . June 7, 2026. From the Washington Post — one of the most powerful newspapers in the world.

And it confirms what communities from Nashville to Utah to New York to Louisiana have been saying for two years: The data center fight is no longer just an environmental story. It is no longer just an energy story. It is no longer just a community story.

It is now an election story. And the politicians who ignored it are running out of time to catch up.

THE TWO MOMS WHO ARE ABOUT TO CHANGE AMERICAN POLITICS

Meet Annette Singh and Annie Cannelongo. Two full-time mothers. Living in Hilliard, Ohio — a suburban community outside Columbus that most people in Washington D.C. have never heard of.

They are not political activists. They are not lobbyists. They are not funded by any organization. They are moms. Who take their children to a park next to an elementary school. A park that sits next to the land where Amazon Web Services just broke ground on a data center campus.

Annette Singh and Annie Cannelongo will vote in November in this midterm battleground with one issue at the top of their minds: data centers. The full-time moms say their fury over the massive computer-filled warehouses has consumed them ever since Amazon Web Services broke ground on a data center site that stretches from the lush playground their kids use close to the elementary school that Singh’s child attends. 

Consumed. That is the word the Washington Post used. Not concerned. Not worried. Consumed.

This is what it looks like when a company makes a decision — quietly, without public input, without community notification — that reaches into the daily life of a mother pushing her child on a swing. And she looks up. And realizes that the land next to where her child plays is being turned into an industrial AI facility. And nobody asked her. Nobody told her. Nobody even sent a letter.

That is the moment that creates a voter who is consumed. And consumed voters — in midterm elections — decide who wins and who loses.

AND THE WASHINGTON POST JUST CONFIRMED: DATA CENTERS WILL DECIDE THE 2026 MIDTERMS

Why most politicians are not calling for data center bans despite voters’ anger. 

That is the headline. From the Washington Post. Published TODAY.

Not “Why voters are angry about data centers.” The Washington Post already knows voters are angry — that is not news anymore. The news is why politicians are not responding. Why they are not calling for bans. Why they are not answering the phones and emails and text messages flooding their offices.

The answer — which the Post lays out in devastating detail — is money. Campaign contributions. Economic development deals. The revolving door between state government and the tech industry. The billion-dollar tax breaks that local officials negotiated in secret and cannot defend in public.

Politicians know the voters are furious. They are calculating whether the fury will still be there in November. And two moms in Hilliard, Ohio — standing in a park next to an elementary school — just told the Washington Post that yes. It will still be there. It will be the first thing they think about when they walk into the voting booth.

“VERY SOON — MAYBE EVEN LATER THIS YEAR — WE’LL BE PRODUCING MORE CHIPS THAN WE CAN TURN ON”

This quote — published by Bloomberg THIS WEEK — is the most extraordinary admission in the history of the AI boom. And it came from inside the industry itself.

Artificial intelligence data centers are on the verge of reaching their limits. To meet ballooning demand, chipmakers like Nvidia are churning out ever more powerful chips, requiring a new generation of data centers that will draw many times more power than their predecessors. “Very soon, maybe even later this year, we’ll be producing more chips than we can turn on,” Tesla Inc.’s energy division warned. 

More chips than we can turn on. This year. Because there is not enough electricity. Not enough transformers. Not enough grid capacity. Not enough water. Not enough community tolerance.

The boom that was supposed to be unstoppable just admitted — through one of its own industry insiders — that it is approaching the physical limits of what America’s infrastructure can support.

And the communities fighting back — from Hilliard, Ohio to Nashville, Tennessee to Box Elder County, Utah to New York State — are a major reason why.

AND ERIN BROCKOVICH JUST SAID THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF THE ENTIRE FIGHT — YESTERDAY ON FOX NEWS

Erin Brockovich said she’s received thousands of reports on AI data centers — and the most common concern is transparency. “If data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?” she asks. 

Seven words. That is all it took.

If data centers are so great — why are they being built in secret?

Why the NDAs? Why the shell companies? Why the secret meetings? Why the elected officials who cannot tell their constituents what was discussed? Why the farmers who had to sign a confidentiality agreement to find out who wanted to buy their land? Why the communities that found out about $12 billion projects the same day as a press conference?

If the benefits are as real as the companies claim — if the jobs are real, the tax revenue is real, the economic development is real — then why does every single deal require secrecy? Why does every single community have to fight for basic information that should be public from the moment a permit is filed?

Erin Brockovich — who has built a career on one simple principle: the public has a right to know — just asked the question that 288,000 Nashville petition signers, and 6,615 BrockovichDataCenter.com reporters, and two moms in a Hilliard, Ohio playground are all asking in different ways.

Why the secrets?

AND THE NUMBERS THIS WEEK TELL THE COMPLETE STORY OF WHERE AMERICA STANDS

Let us put the complete picture of this single week in American data center history in one place:

288,000 people signed the Nashville Zoo petition in 5 days. The Nashville Metro Council votes on a data center moratorium THIS Tuesday.

New York passed the first statewide data center freeze in American history on Thursday.

Kevin O’Leary was forced to cut his Utah Stratos Project from 40,000 to 20,000 acres after community and political pressure.

Virginia Beach permanently banned all new large-scale data centers.

Amazon’s own engineers stood in Seattle City Hall and called their company’s AI expansion an approach that will cause “staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”

“In a month, 3,862 residents submitted reports. The map now has 2,716 pins and represents 49 states,” Erin Brockovich wrote on May 27, 2026. 

49 states. 2,716 pins. 288,000 petition signers. 6,615 personal reports. One statewide freeze. One permanent city ban. One Shark Tank star cut in half. One zoo with 3,000 animals and a 50th clouded leopard cub.

And two moms in Hilliard, Ohio who told the Washington Post that data centers will be the first thing on their mind when they vote in November.

AND HERE IS WHAT HAPPENS NEXT — THIS WEEK AND BEYOND

Tuesday June 10: Nashville Metro Council votes on data center moratorium. The most watched local vote in America right now.

By end of June: Governor Hochul must decide whether to sign or veto New York’s historic data center freeze.

June 23: Utah Republican primary — where the Stratos Project and Kevin O’Leary’s data center is the defining campaign issue in the Senate President’s race.

November 2026: Midterm elections. Where two moms in Hilliard, Ohio — and millions of Americans like them — will vote with data centers at the top of their minds.

The fight that started in town halls and commission meetings and online petitions is moving to the ballot box. And no politician — regardless of party, regardless of how much they have accepted from the tech industry — can ignore 288,000 signatures and two full-time moms on the front page of the Washington Post.

Here is the bottom line of June 7, 2026:

America has reached the moment in the data center fight when the political system can no longer pretend it is not happening. When the Washington Post puts two Ohio moms on its front page. When Erin Brockovich asks on Fox News why these projects are built in secret. When Amazon’s own engineers stand in city hall and call their company’s approach damaging to democracy. When a state legislature passes a historic freeze and a city permanently bans new facilities — all in the same week.

This is not a protest movement anymore. It is not a grassroots campaign. It is not a fringe concern.

It is American democracy doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Voters deciding what happens in their communities. Politicians being forced to respond. Companies being held accountable.

The clouded leopard cubs are counting on it. The moms in Ohio are voting on it. And 288,000 Americans — and counting — have already said where they stand.

Where do YOU stand?

COMMENT below — are YOU voting in November with data centers on your mind? Tell us your state. Tell us your story. Let’s show every politician in America exactly how many voters this issue has reached.

LIKE this post if you believe that two moms in Ohio standing next to their children’s playground have more right to decide what gets built in their community than an Atlanta company filing a permit in secret.

SHARE THIS with every voter, every parent, every person who lives near a data center that was approved without their knowledge or consent. The midterms are five months away. This story is just beginning.

FOLLOW this page — we are covering the Nashville vote on Tuesday, the New York signing, the Utah primary, and every political battle between now and November in real time. The most important chapters of this fight are still being written. Don’t miss a word.

SOURCES:
Washington Post — Why Most Politicians Are Not Calling for Data Center Bans Despite Voters’ Anger (June 7, 2026)
LiveNOW from FOX — Erin Brockovich Pushing for Data Center Transparency as AI Booms (June 7, 2026)
Bloomberg — How AI Firms Are Redesigning Data Centers to Meet Energy Demand (June 1, 2026)
NewsChannel 5 Nashville — Nashville Zoo Fights Proposed Data Center Next Door, Citing Risks to Rare Animals (June 7, 2026)
Tom’s Hardware — Half of Planned US Data Center Builds Have Been Delayed or Canceled (April 2026)
Food and Water Watch — The Top 10 Reasons Data Centers Must Be Stopped — VICTORY Update (June 5, 2026)
Fortune — Amazon Engineers Speak Out Against AI Data Center Expansion (June 5, 2026)
Data Center Knowledge — New Data Center Developments: June 2026 (June 3, 2026)

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BREAKING: “YOU FIND THE VOTES!” Republican Senate leader John Thune fires back at Trump over his complaints they can’t pass his election-steal bill.

A full-blown Republican civil war burst into the open after the White House publicly attacked Senate Majority Leader John Thune over President Donald Trump's stalled voter suppression bill, only to have Republican senators line up behind their leader and admit Trump's top legislative priority will never have the votes to pass.

The extraordinary public feud erupted after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt warned reporters that Trump's "patience is running out" with Thune over the Senate's failure to advance the SAVE America Act, a voting measure Trump has demanded Congress pass before the August recess.

Thune didn't hide his irritation with KKKaroline.

"She or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?" Thune shot back. "So instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats. And if there are Republicans that they think are gettable, get on the phone. Let's get them to 'yes.'"

But the real shock came when Republican senators openly contradicted the White House and acknowledged that Trump's demands simply aren't possible.

"We just don't have the votes, and so there's nothing that Senator Thune can do to change that," Sen. John Cornyn said. "This idea that he can just command members of the Republican Conference to get in line is just a fantasy."

Cornyn warned that someone had badly misled Trump about the bill's prospects.

"I don't know who it was that sold the president on this idea that this was attainable, but it's creating a circular firing squad for Republicans," he said.

"Here we are, what, 103 days before the midterm elections, and this is not a great place for us to be."

Other Republican senators echoed the same message, making clear that Trump's pressure campaign cannot overcome the basic math in the Senate.

"Everybody wants to talk about 60 votes. We don't have 51 votes," Sen. John Hoeven said.

Sen. John Kennedy defended Thune while delivering one of the day's most memorable lines. "John's doing the best he can, but John can't put a gun to people's heads and make them vote a particular way. When you're [the] majority leader, you take a lot of the spears and the arrows. That's his job."

Even Sen. Rick Scott, one of the SAVE America Act's biggest supporters and a frequent critic of Thune, acknowledged the difficult position both men find themselves in. "It's hard being leader," Scott said of Thune. "I'm sure if I was the president of the United States, I'd be frustrated if everything I wanted didn't get done."

The increasingly public clash comes after Trump has spent months demanding action on the SAVE America Act, a proposal that would require proof of citizenship for voter registration, stricter voter identification requirements and major new restrictions on mail voting.

For months, Trump has insisted Republicans simply need to "get it done." Now his own party is publicly admitting that's fantasy.

The votes don't exist, the White House can't bully them into existence, and Trump's latest pressure campaign has accomplished something he never intended: exposing a growing Republican schism for everyone to see.

 

Eileen Foster

 

The woman they hired to catch fraud caught the biggest fraud in America. So they fired her.

Her name is Eileen Foster. And what they did to her should make you angry.

Foster hunted fraud for a living. Twenty-five years. She was good at it.

Then she landed the big job. Head of fraud investigations at Countrywide. The largest home loan company in America. She had thirty to forty investigators under her. She reported to regulators. To the board.

She thought she was protecting the company. She had no idea what she was about to find.

2007. A call came in on her fraud hotline. A fired worker in Boston. He said there was massive fraud in the branches. Going on for years. Nobody ever did a thing.

Foster dug in. What she found was sickening.

Employees were forging borrowers' signatures. Faking incomes. Making broke people look rich. Doctoring documents. Tricking the computer systems.

Why? To push through loans that should never have been approved. To people who could never pay them back.

Every bad loan meant a fat commission. The salesmen got rich. The borrowers got buried.

She shut down six branches in Boston. Fired around forty-four people. She thought she was cleaning house.

Then it got worse. She found the same fraud everywhere. Miami. Chicago. Las Vegas. Los Angeles. City after city.

It was not a few bad apples. It was the whole orchard.

And then she found the most disturbing thing of all.

The company had a hotline for honest workers to report fraud. But it was a trap. When workers reported, they were not protected. They were tipped-off on, demoted, harassed, fired. The wrongdoers got warned. The whistleblowers got crushed. Rigged to protect the salesmen making the most money.

Foster gathered the evidence. Mountains of it. She reported it up the chain.

That is when she became the target.

Instead of fixing the fraud, the company came after her. Her job. Her name. They twisted her statements. Cooked up phony findings about her.

Bank of America was buying Countrywide by then. They had their own reasons to want her quiet. She knew too much.

September 2008. They fired her.

They slid a document across her desk. A gag order. And around 228,000 dollars to disappear.

All she had to do was sign. Take the cash. Vanish.

She said no.

She filed a complaint. She took on Bank of America. One of the most powerful banks on Earth. Of 1,500 whistleblowers like her, only 21 had ever won. She knew the odds and went anyway.

September 2011. The government ruled in her favor. It found Bank of America had illegally fired her for blowing the whistle. It ordered them to take her back and pay her 930,000 dollars. A regulator said the bank had used illegal tactics against her, and that she had shown great courage.

She threw the hush money back in their faces. Then she beat them for four times as much.

Her story went national. 60 Minutes put her on television. And a stunning fact came out.

She had run fraud investigations at the company at the very heart of the crisis. And the Justice Department had never even called her. Never once asked what she knew.

Now here is the part that should keep you up at night.

The fraud she exposed helped crash the entire economy. Millions of families lost their homes. Their savings. Everything.

And the men who built the machine? Take Angelo Mozilo, the tanned, silver-haired CEO who ran Countrywide. He paid a 67.5 million dollar settlement to the SEC. He was never criminally charged. He never spent a single day in prison. He kept his fortune and died a free, wealthy man in 2023.

The banks paid huge fines. The men who ran them walked away rich. And free.

Foster proved the fraud was real. She proved it came from the top. And still, not one of them saw a jail cell.

She was the fraud cop. When she caught the biggest fraud of all, they tried to bury her for it. She refused to be buried. She kept her name. Kept her voice. Became a hero for whistleblowers everywhere. And she is still standing today, still fighting for the people brave enough to tell the truth.

The bankers who broke millions of families never spent one day in jail. They are betting you will just forget.

So do not give them that. Drop a word below for the woman who refused the hush money and told the truth anyway. Share her story so the men who got away with it never get the silence they paid for.

 

Good morning, my friends. It's second cuppa coffee time, and I'm looking through the headlines, shaking my head, rolling my eyes, and waiting for the "aha" to hit - the outrageous or ridiculous or alarming thing that I just can't NOT write about.

You ask me all the time, don't I get overwhelmed? And yes, I do. But I have a way to deal with that. I write. I get it all out. And then I get feedback from YOU, and validation, and additional information, and emotional support. And THAT gives me a better handle on it which leads to having a sense of stability and even control.

Suddenly, I am not alone in the dark scary forest with a quagmire under my feet, and sharp toothed creatures stalking me behind the trees.

You are there, and you are not empty handed. You are carrying flashlights and maps and tents and blankets and food and water. You bring your knowledge and experience and just as importantly, your sense of humor.

So, rather than starting off with the grim stuff, like I said on Monday, let me just chat with you about what I am seeing and sensing lately. Please chat back. I really want to know what you are thinking, too.

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If you don't know me that well, yet, this is not a group or professional page, just my personal profile page. I have not monetized it. I am retired and nobody is paying me. I do not take donations, and I have stayed off platforms that use subscriptions. No, I am NOT rich, LOL. I am just at the age and stage of life that I refuse to ever be beholden or have to answer to any boss or corporation or social organization or entity again. No more crap. I love debates and discussions, but I will not stand for disrespect or abuse from anybody. Not towards me, and not to my friends here on this page.

One of the many jobs I enjoyed was working on various local AM radio stations doing talk shows and the news. I got REAL good at skimming the news for the important stuff, connecting the dots, and condensing it simply for a three-and-a-half-minute newscast. On the nose, to the second, so there would be room for the weather, traffic and commercial spots.

I really appreciate good journalism and I gotta tell you, I am SO pissed off at what I am seeing these days!

Mainstream news, either because their owners are so afraid of lawsuits or Epstein-type threats, or because they have been BOUGHT with government contracts and investments, have done their best to muzzle truly hard-hitting reports.

Trump propaganda media has been elevated by the White House to "legitimate" status. Most people do not know the difference between tabloid reporting, magazine stories, punditry, opinion, or journalism anymore. For the record, I regard myself as a pundit. I am a commentator. I gather reports from a wide variety of sources, and I do my radio thing.

As for independent online journalism, I am losing patience lately with most Youtube podcasters, because EVERY title graphic these folks use is sensationalized click bait - some Emergency Chaos that will End It All - which they will tell you all about, but first please click this, this, and that, and buy their book and watch their ad. And then, ten or fifteen minutes later, when they FINALLY get to what they were hyping, its pretty much a nothingburger.

At least half of them are about Trump is "dying" and losing his mind. And yes, he has both physical and mental issues... but... no, their hype is just the same old stuff we already know about.

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HOWEVER. The past few months there has been a definite change in him, both physically and mentally, and this is accelerating. Rapidly.

Trump is a performing artist, and he has used scripts all his life. He portrays two fictional characters. The first is his stage persona, which we all know well.

He used to be able to keep to his script, and even "weave" all kinds of personal observations and anecdotes and stories into them without losing the narrative. But his real talent was in turning to the audience, or to the officials he was using as props, and getting them to laugh, applaud and nod on cue.

Once he got them to participate with him, they were his.

And then there was the OTHER character he created. The one everyone who has met him in person has commented on. "He's not like that when you sit down and talk to him," they all say with surprise. "He's so reasonable and CARING." Uh huh.

We all have gotten a glimpse of THAT character. It's like he takes off a mask. His voice drops, no longer strident or sing-songy, but soft-spoken and "normal". No-no-no, he says with a little laugh, he is not REALLY going to do such-and-such, he just has to SAY that so that the press and "our" adversaries will take him seriously.

THAT is the persona he uses to sweet talk donors and investors. The one he uses behind closed doors to make deals. To win converts to his cult. To seduce.

Who is the REAL Trump? The one who scares the shit out of his staff and the GOP. The erratic, childish tyrant who LIKES to torture people. Who needs to assert his dominance and be the center of attention every single moment. The one who threatens, not with violence, but with "dirt," or lawsuits, or taking away their positions or contracts or access to MONEY.

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And that leads us to where I am going with this. More and more, he is losing control of his stage personas, and he can no longer keep to his script. His REAL self is no longer kept behind the curtain, but is out in full view, constantly threatening. No more happy official portraits or coin images, just glowering, nasty images of his inner self.

He uses only a few phrases now. Someone is either "highly respected" or "low IQ" or "fake". He repeats the same line over and over and over again. He has apparently only a handful of lines he can remember, and he trots them out to answer every question, no matter the subject. When he goes OFF script, he loses his place, and cannot weave his way back. And he is forgetting words.

Yesterday at the Oval presser with the President of Lebanon, he tried to change the subject of his disastrous war in Iran to Venezuela. How easy and quick his "war" was. How he's taking millions of barrels of oil out, like nobody has ever seen before which has paid for "that violent war" ten times over, like nobody thought was possible.

He said Venezuela is now a very HAPPY place, [OOPS. HE JUST REMEMBERED THEY ARE NOT] "but, uh, they had a tragic incident, uh, with the event that took place, a couple of days ago, uh, a couple of weeks ago, what a, uh, what a terrible thing that was, uh, they had a movement, a shifting, uh, that was unbelievable, nobody's ever, THEY've never seen anything like it, a lot of people were killed, so it's all unrelated [WHAT?] and by the way, we were one of the first ones there to help, we were there to help, Venezuela, [LIGHT DAWNS! YOU CAN SEE IN HIS EYES HE SUDDENLY REMEMBERS THE WORD] it was an EARTHQUAKE, I guess you'd CALL it, uh, a pretty massive EARTHQUAKE, and we were able to do a lot of good."

In the middle of all that fishing around for the word he could not remember (um, man, woman, person, TV, camera?) Trump turned to President Aoun as if he expected him to jump in like one of his aides and give him the word he was looking for. Trump did the same thing at the NATO Summit, looking at Rutte the same way when he got stuck. He does that more and more now.

He also closes his eyes immediately when someone he's with starts speaking, even if he is standing up. It's like he is either on or he is off. He turns on when the spotlight is on him, and off when it is not.

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He's constantly mentioning "genes" now, and the "racehorse theory" that the supremacists of the third reich promoted. Well, speaking of his own, his father developed Alzheimer's at his age, and it progressed rapidly.

I worked with nursing home dementia patients for a lot of years as a music therapist (one of the other jobs I loved) and got pretty familiar with the different forms and presentations of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. I certainly am not qualified to diagnose anybody, but the things I am seeing in him are pretty dang familiar.

He simply does NOT have two more years, I believe, or even until January. In fact, I will be surprised if he lasts until the Midterms. Not that he would die, of natural causes at least, but simply because he can no longer play his part.

The GOP and the billionaire donors behind Project 2025, who want to replace our government with a Corporate model, have all put up with and catered to his tantrums and whims because it has paid off for them. Until NOW.

But his war with Iran, his disruptive social media decrees, his obsessions, and his paranoia are getting harder to manage. Damage control is getting impossible because he not only countermanding their efforts, he is kicking those people out of the room-where-it-happens, and choosing new "favorites" all the time.

Stephen Miller was reportedly even exiled for a while. Trump now has three young female aides in constant attendance, 24/7, plus Karoline Leavitt and Susie Wiles. But he seems to be keeping all the men remaining in his orbit more and more at arms length.

They are losing their grip on him, and he has lost the grip on himself.

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I honestly thought that Trump would step down after his birthday last month, and retire with a full pardon, with promises for lucrative government contracts for his sons, and a permanent place on the world stage through the Chairmanship of his Board of Peace.

I still think it will happen soon. But maybe not voluntarily any more.

He is mentally intact enough to know he will lose the Midterm elections, but he obviously thinks he can overturn them one way or another - maybe with a whole batch of ways - or by using some kind of "emergency" to stop them completely.

But that may not be PROFITABLE for his backers any more, not the way it would be if he was still running the show COMPETENTLY as its front man.

Plus, there has been a HUGE shift in power, wealth, and alliances in Europe and the Middle East, as a result of Trump's bungling. China has gotten stronger, not weaker. And Putin has become a loose cannon, with the potential to cause as much damage to their tidy plans as Trump.

They have miscalculated. And the sociopathic sharks who rise to those positions of power do not operate out of sentimentality or compassion or lofty principles of morality and justice.

Or patriotism. They have international interests. They are not doing it for God or party, either. It's all about THEIR money, and THEIR power. They will cut their losses. And they will invest elsewhere. And that may not even be in America.

Some of his biggest donors are not from HERE, after all.

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The only thing I know for sure is that change is coming, and it will come soon.

OK. That's my two cents. What are you seeing, and what are you thinking?

- Glee Violette