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Good evening. I just walked off the stage at the University of Texas International Journalism Symposium, where I got to talk about something I think matters more than almost anything else in media right now: reaching the people who have completely tuned out. We are pulling in young people who have never once turned on a cable news broadcast in their lives, along with a growing wave of conservatives who are fed up with what Fox has become and are looking for something that just tells them the truth. And the numbers back it up. This is now three weeks running that we have out-engaged Fox News. Three weeks. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen without you. If you’ve been reading for a while and haven’t subscribed yet, today’s the day. Every subscription is what lets me keep doing this instead of chasing whatever algorithm rewards outrage over accuracy. You’re not just supporting a newsletter, you’re supporting an alternative to a media environment that keeps failing the people who need real information most. So if this rundown is doing something for you, help me keep it going and bring more people into the tent.
And there is a lot to get into today. Mitch McConnell resurfaced this week after a mysterious 92-day absence looking frail and unable to answer basic questions, and had to be coached through a committee vote by his own colleagues. Florida Republican Maria Elvira Salazar broke publicly with Trump on immigration, one of several signs that the GOP is quietly running from him ahead of the midterms. RFK Jr. told a major anti-vaccine conference they have “a strong and steadfast friend” in him, even as measles keeps killing Americans. Plus gas and diesel prices are spiking to record highs, a judge just ordered Trump to give 30 days’ notice before touching the Kennedy Center, and a whole lot more below. Let’s get into it. Mitch McConnell Concerns Grow: Mitch McConnell resurfaced in Washington this week after a mysterious 92-day absence, looking notably frail and offering only gestures rather than verbal responses to reporters. A video showed the 84-year-old Kentucky senator being wheeled to a Senate vote on the CLARITY Act, acknowledging questions with thumbs-up and peace signs but not speaking, and his team had separately instructed reporters not to record him during his Monday return. CNN’s Manu Raju noted his voice sounded “slower” than before, and reporters observed him looking gaunter and thinner, with a dark bruise covering much of his left hand. Speculation over his condition has run high since his June hospitalization, and his wife, Elaine Chao, who was in China when he was hospitalized and stayed for several more days, has still not commented on his return.
 A Republican colleague had to correct McConnell’s vote during a Senate Agriculture Committee farm bill markup, his third day back after the three-month absence. When his name was called, McConnell began to vote “aye,” but Senator John Hoeven, seated beside him, leaned in and told him to vote “no,” causing visible confusion until Senator John Boozman reassured McConnell that “aye” was correct and the clerk called his name again. McConnell then voted “aye” with more volume, and the farm bill ultimately advanced out of committee in a 12-11 party-line vote. Hoeven’s office later said he had briefly misunderstood the nature of the vote, and McConnell’s team pointed reporters to a first-person statement posted on his X account praising the bill’s passage, a statement that contrasted with his largely nonverbal appearance in person.
 Taken together, the pattern is genuinely alarming for a sitting U.S. senator who has real legislative power over the rest of this Congress. McConnell has been repeatedly photographed with a blank, vacant expression and his mouth hanging open, has refused to answer any direct questions from reporters about his health since returning, and needed real-time coaching from colleagues just to cast a routine committee vote correctly. That is a sharp contrast with the crisp, first-person statements his office keeps posting on his behalf, which raises real questions about who is actually speaking for him. His own staff’s refusal to explain his 92-day disappearance, combined with his wife’s continued silence and her decision to stay in China for days after his hospitalization, has only deepened concerns rather than resolved them. With McConnell still serving out his term and voting on major legislation, the gap between how he appears in person and how his office presents him to the public is the kind of thing that deserves real scrutiny, not just viral clips.
 Republicans Breaking From Trump: Florida Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar released a striking new ad telling Trump directly that Hispanic voters “feel betrayed” by his immigration agenda, marking a rare public break from the president by a member of his own party. In the ad, Salazar cites statistics showing 50% of people ICE detained in July “had no criminal record” and warns Trump to “be careful what your advisers are telling you,” while stopping short of asking for “amnesty” and instead calling for a “dignified life” for immigrants. The ad lands as ICE arrests hit record highs, with roughly 51,000 people taken into custody in August alone, and as Florida’s heavy use of the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police for immigration enforcement, has made the state a hotspot for enforcement actions, including the recent “Alligator Alcatraz” facility that a DHS inspector general found had held nearly 80 detainees in small metal enclosures. Salazar represents a Miami-Dade district that is roughly three-quarters Hispanic and voted for Trump by nearly 15 points in 2024, underscoring how much political risk Republicans see in the crackdown.
 A Washington Post analysis of more than a million social media posts found Republican candidates have nearly halved their mentions of Trump since January, actively distancing themselves from him ahead of the midterms despite his own advice to lean into his brand. One GOP senator told Punchbowl that Trump was “putting a noose around all of our necks” by escalating trade wars so close to the election, and some Kentucky Republicans have reportedly scrubbed Trump’s name from their campaign websites entirely. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 13% of Americans strongly approve of Trump, down from 23% a year earlier, with only 35% of Republicans saying they “strongly approve” of his second term and 41% of registered voters saying they’d back a Democrat if the election were held today. The White House itself reportedly encouraged this distancing back in July, telling midterm-bound Republicans to break from Trump given the political drag from the Iran war, cost of living, tariffs, and health care costs. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace is warning that the midterms are shaping up to be “a bloodbath” for her party. When CNN’s Manu Raju pressed her on Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that the House is sending members home to campaign because they’ve “done such a great job,” Mace pushed back hard, flatly rejecting the framing and pointing out that Congress currently holds some of the lowest approval ratings in its history.
 RFK Jr. Speaks to Anti-Vaccine Conference: RFK Jr told a major anti-vaccine conference that anti-vaxxers have “a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” even as the worst measles outbreak in decades continues to kill Americans. Speaking for nearly an hour and a half at the Children’s Health Defense conference in Washington, the organization he led for almost two decades, the health secretary said he would have made sweeping changes “on day one” but had to follow the law. He addressed the outbreak itself only once, dismissing concern for measles deaths while urging the crowd to instead “care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries.” The outbreak has killed people in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Arizona, and polling shows most Americans disapprove of how the administration has handled it, even as a quarter of Americans now say they have doubts about the MMR vaccine.
 Kennedy used the platform to make unsupported claims linking vaccines to a range of serious conditions, describing vaccine-injured children as “damaged.” He claimed diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, and anorexia can be vaccine side effects, and said the system for tracking such effects is “broken.” He also spent time on food systems, electromagnetic fields, and chem trails, and he praised a group of Danish researchers now under investigation by their own institution as “the deities of vaccine research.” Andrew Wakefield, the discredited researcher whose medical license was revoked for fabricating a vaccine-autism link, spoke alongside Kennedy and joked about how far the movement has come, saying, “I could not have imagined two years ago that Bobby would be in the White House.”
 Other speakers made clear the movement now sees itself as ascendant rather than fringe, with some Republican lawmakers embracing the label outright. CHD’s advocacy director recalled the group’s anxiety earlier this year when the White House reportedly told officials to go quiet on vaccines ahead of the midterms, but said “we are a national movement that isn’t going anywhere.” Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson called being labeled the largest anti-vaccine conference in the world “a red badge of courage,” while Kentucky Senator Rand Paul rehashed Covid-era grievances alongside him. Publisher Tony Lyons went furthest, calling measles coverage a “psy op” and describing Kennedy as “the most dangerous individual to this system who’s come along in a generation,” a line delivered as praise to applause from the crowd.
Other news: Judge Orders Trump to Give 30 Days’ Notice Before Any Kennedy Center Demolition. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to give at least 30 days’ notice before taking any steps to demolish the Kennedy Center, after lawyers for Rep. Joyce Beatty submitted new evidence citing Trump’s own comments about the building potentially being “ripped down.” Trump told reporters in North Carolina that without his name on the venue “it’s going to close” and “end up being ripped down,” while a photo circulating on social media appeared to show him aboard Air Force One looking at a poster reading “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED,” though Reuters has not independently verified the image. Judge Christopher Cooper denied Beatty’s request for an emergency hearing after the Trump-backed board voted this week to close the venue for up to two years for a $257 million renovation, even as Beatty’s lawyers argued the closure is “a recipe for defendants extending their shutdown forever” without the court’s permission. The board maintains the current seven-day closure for safety assessments is separate from the larger renovation plan and doesn’t violate Cooper’s prior order, while the administration says it will ask the judge by Friday to lift that order entirely to allow the “closure necessary to complete the restoration.” Cooper had already rejected the board’s latest attempt to put Trump’s name on the building this week, a ruling the administration is appealing, with Trump warning on social media that the Kennedy Center “is destined to doom” if it isn’t allowed to close for repairs. Andrew Tate is complaining about his prison conditions. Andrew Tate, who is facing a lifetime behind bars for horrific sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom and Romania, is complaining about his prison conditions today:
Diesel and gas prices are spiking to record levels, and experts say it’s going to get worse. Diesel hit a new national record Thursday at $6.40 a gallon, up 73% over the past year, while regular gas jumped to $4.44 a gallon, up 39% and closing in on the all-time record set in June 2022, according to AAA. Analysts including GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan and Gulf Oil’s Tom Kloza are warning of even steeper increases ahead, with SoFi’s Liz Thomas predicting diesel could hit $6.65 a gallon by Election Day as fallout from Trump’s Iran war restricts global oil supplies through Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on a major Saudi pipeline. Trump himself dismissed the pain at a North Carolina rally, calling the higher fuel costs “a very inexpensive price to pay” for the war and insisting prices will eventually come “tumbling down like a rocket ship in reverse,” even as former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene stood at an $8.50-a-gallon diesel pump in California and said flatly, “This is Trump’s fault.” Because diesel powers the trucks and trains that move most consumer goods, the spike is already pushing up food prices, with grocery costs up 2.2% and restaurant prices up 3.4% over the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Pentagon is reportedly seeking only the fittest and most “impeccably” groomed troops to appear alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at his September 30 “State of the Force” address. According to the Wall Street Journal, an email sent to Army commanders this week asks them to nominate soldiers who meet the Army’s preferred waist-to-height ratio and fitness standards, along with “impeccable grooming and uniform standards (no exception),” with selections based on “demonstrated leadership quality and professional character.” The request fits a pattern for Hegseth, who has pushed a “clean-shaven military,” banned beards outside special forces, sent overweight Texas National Guard members home from a Chicago deployment, and previously refused to meet with bearded troops holding medical shaving waivers in South Korea. A Pentagon spokesman defended the standards as consistent with Hegseth’s “highest expectations” for service members’ appearance, fitness, and discipline, while The Daily Show’s Josh Johnson mocked the fixation, joking that Hegseth “cannot count the number of missiles you need to fight a war with Iran but when it comes to male physique he’s in A Beautiful Mind.” The news comes the same week Rep. Thomas Massie filed a resolution to impeach Hegseth over his handling of the Iran war, Caribbean boat strikes, and free speech disputes, forcing a House vote within two days. Meet the First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years. Scientists have identified a new wild cat species, Leopardus tilcayo, from Bolivia’s Yungas forest, the first entirely new felid species discovered in over a century. The animal was first spotted in 2016 by biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz after a local sanctuary took in a small, spotted kitten that had been raised briefly as a pet, and she initially assumed it was a known species called the tiger cat before noticing its rosettes looked distinctly different from reference photos. It took years of genomic analysis with geneticist Eduardo Eizirik and researcher Jonas Lescroart to confirm the cat, weighing only about 3 pounds, had diverged from its closest relatives around 1.4 million years ago, an evolutionary split comparable to the distance between modern lions and extinct cave lions. The discovery, published in Current Biology, also reshapes the broader tiger cat family tree, raising the total number of recognized tiger cat species to five and suggesting the margay, long thought to be one species across Mexico through Argentina, may actually be four distinct species. Researchers say the findings carry real conservation stakes, since splitting one presumed species into several smaller, more geographically limited populations means each may need urgent individual protection, and they expect similar genomic techniques to reveal more hidden small cat species in Africa and Asia.
 The family of Tierra Walker, a 37-year-old Texas woman who died in 2024 while 20 weeks pregnant, is suing Attorney General Ken Paxton, blaming his state abortion ban for her death. Walker had a history of preeclampsia and repeatedly asked for an abortion at around 8 and 11 weeks after experiencing seizures, nausea, and pain, but doctors dismissed her symptoms, offered mental health treatment instead, and according to the family’s attorney, avoided even writing the word “abortion” in her medical records despite noting she was at “high” risk of death. She wasn’t formally diagnosed with preeclampsia until late December, nearly three months after her complications began, and was still denied an abortion before being found dead at home days later. The lawsuit argues Texas’s “political and medical establishments not only failed but actively harmed” Walker, and that an abortion at any point in her pregnancy would have saved her life, while also pointing to Paxton’s aggressive pursuit of medical providers as creating a chilling effect on doctors. Paxton’s office has not publicly responded The FBI internally warned that a small group of women were allegedly creating fake “tradwife” dating profiles to lure and dox ICE agents, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian. The February memo, disseminated by the FBI’s Chicago office, said the profiles used “traditional wife” imagery and tailored interests to attract law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person “date” before publicly exposing them, though it offered no details on which dating platforms were used, where the alleged scheme was based, or whether any agents were actually exposed. The FBI itself labeled the report “not finally evaluated intelligence,” and critics like Property of the People’s Ryan Shapiro and former FBI agent Mike German called it thinly sourced, with German suggesting it was likely inspired by an earlier, similarly unverified New York Post story about “lefty TikTokkers” targeting ICE agents. German argued the memo “reinforces the paranoid ‘us versus them’ mentality within law enforcement” and noted that ICE agents, as public employees, don’t have the same anonymity claims as undercover operatives. The memo is one of more than a dozen similar internal law enforcement warnings about ICE doxing obtained through records requests, including reports on cartel bounties, AI-assisted scraping tools, and even smart glasses, reflecting a broader pattern of agencies escalating concern over immigration enforcement backlash even when the underlying evidence remains vague or unconfirmed. A Texas police department that arrested a mom for complaining about contaminated drinking water on Facebook has been ordered to disband after state investigators found it “failed to meet minimum standards.” Jennifer Combs was arrested for felony false alarm in May and spent 23 hours in jail after posting on Facebook that bacteria in Trinidad’s water pipes had sent residents to the hospital, a claim Police Chief Charles Gregory called “simply false,” though an environmental investigation later uncovered real issues with the city’s water supply and charges against Combs were dropped. The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement revoked Trinidad’s license to operate its own police department on September 9, finding it lacked 18 required policies, including on use of force and active shooters, and couldn’t demonstrate it provided any public benefit to the community. The police chief had already resigned in June following national backlash over the arrests, and the judge who approved Combs’s arrest warrant later said the department misled him by omitting key information. Combs said after the shutdown that “we were never the problem, we were exposing it,” and the department’s five full-time officers will transfer to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office, which will now handle policing for the town of about 70 miles south of Dallas. Chipotle has quietly partnered with Peter Thiel’s surveillance and data company Palantir to build a “food safety risk platform” tracking pest incidents, employee illness, and health inspection scores across its stores. The partnership runs on Palantir’s Foundry software, and while it’s unclear how long it’s been in place, it adds Chipotle to a client list that already includes General Mills, Tyson, and Wendy’s, even as Palantir is far better known for its billions of dollars in federal contracts, including building data systems for the Trump administration and an app used by ICE to help plan raids. Chipotle confirmed the partnership but declined to elaborate, and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment. Critics point to Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s own past comments about “disrupting” democratic power as reason for concern about how far the company’s reach into everyday consumer data could extend, especially with the Trump administration resisting AI regulation. Trump Withdraws His Nominee to Lead ICE. The White House has withdrawn, without explanation, Lance Schroyer’s nomination to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, just under three months after Trump tapped the former Oklahoma state trooper to run the agency at the center of his mass deportation campaign. The Senate has not confirmed an ICE director in more than a decade, and there were reportedly mounting signs Schroyer would have faced real resistance clearing that hurdle. Americans have spent $107 billion more on gas and diesel since the Iran war began seven months ago, according to a Brown University tracker cited by the Wall Street Journal. That works out to roughly $822 in extra costs per household, with the pain concentrated hardest in Western states like Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Despite Trump publicly insisting the war will end “immediately” after the midterms because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” advisers including JD Vance and Marco Rubio have reportedly discussed scenarios where the conflict drags on well past Trump’s own term. A new poll from the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs found support for the war has dropped 6 points since April to just 40% approval, with 17% of Republicans now saying Trump made a mistake attacking Iran and 16% saying the war has made the country less safe. F-16 fighter jet crashes during training exercise near Alpena, Michigan, prompting evacuations but no fatalities. The aircraft went down during a routine training mission, and the pilot ejected safely before the crash. Witnesses in the area described hearing explosions and seeing a large fireball, and local officials ordered an evacuation of the surrounding area as a precaution. The Air National Guard is investigating the cause of the crash. This incident adds to a long history of F-16 safety concerns dating back to the aircraft’s introduction in 1979, when it first entered service.
A Chicago Police Department employee is suing the city after he was suspended for 14 days over personal Facebook posts he made at a “No Kings” protest. Mike Milstein, a civilian employee of the department, attended the protest in Denver on his own time and posted content that included the hashtag “#F**kTrump.” The city suspended him without pay, and his federal lawsuit argues the discipline violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and political expression off duty. His complaint points to what he calls a double standard, citing officers who participated in the January 6th Capitol riot and Trump-pardoned D.C. officers who kept their jobs despite far more serious conduct. The case raises broader questions about how much control a government employer can exert over employees’ personal political speech outside of work. Anthony Kazmierczak has been sentenced to 14 months in prison for spraying Rep. Ilhan Omar with diluted apple cider vinegar from a syringe during a Minneapolis town hall in January 2026. He’ll also serve three years of supervised release and is barred from any contact with Omar. Prosecutors argued the attack was premeditated, pointing to evidence that he’d arranged for a bail bondsman and made plans for his dog’s care before the town hall, signs he anticipated being arrested. His sentencing memo also referenced a history of alcohol abuse and a 2022 Parkinson’s diagnosis as context, though the judge ultimately sided with prosecutors on the prison term. The case is one of several recent incidents targeting members of Congress at public events.
See you soon. — Aaron You’re currently a free subscriber to the Parnas Perspective. For the full experience, more content, and to support Aaron, upgrade your subscription. |
