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RFK Jr.'s Summer Sh*t Show

Americans want straight answers about the cyclosporiasis outbreak, but the nation’s top health official is too busy talking about orange juice and TikTok.

Jennifer Schulze Jul 28 ∙ Guest post

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter

Going to the grocery store these days is a nightmare. Almost everything costs more than it did the week before, and now you also have to worry about whether explosive diarrhea-causing parasites are infecting the fruit and vegetables for sale in the produce section.

I went to three grocery stores near my home this week. At Trader Joe’s, which is like Disneyland for people craving a pre-mixed salad kit, I saw a fully stocked salad section but no shoppers in sight. At Jewel, a large nationally-owned chain, the produce aisles were also eerily empty, but the thing that really jumped out at me was the fire sale on all Taylor Farms products.

Taylor Farms is, of course, the mega produce producer linked to the outbreak. If you dare, you can grab a deeply discounted southwest salad for $2 or a head of lettuce for next to nothing. The same was true at Kroger-owned Mariano’s where I saw an entire wall of Taylor Farms salad products deeply discounted. But why were those products even in the store to begin with? Wasn’t there a recall?

I’m clearly not alone in being both curious and confused about the cyclosporiasis outbreak that has so far made over 12,000 people sick in 41 states. There are many unanswered questions including: Is the problem just lettuce or is it all greens? What about fruit? Is washing your vegetables enough or should you steer clear of all produce right now? Do I need to see a doctor if I get sick?

Americans who want answers have been Googling like mad. Since about June 20, searches for “explosive diarrhea and diarrhea parasite” have skyrocketed.

Explosive Diarrhea Is Big News

Local and national news coverage has been helpful in answering many of these questions about cyclospora while also keeping consumers up to date on the latest findings. Some standouts include The Guardian and Consumer Reports. This piece in The American Prospect details how the DOGE cuts to food safety programs and personnel figures into this mess.

The New York Times broke the story about Taylor Farms execs meeting with the White House to “try to distance the company from the outbreak.” Days later, the FDA announced a false positive test on Taylor Farms lettuce and things got even more confusing. Bloomberg does a good job unraveling that part of the story including the subsequent “apology” controversy. Wired is chasing the money and found that Taylor Farms has donated buckets of cash to Trump and MAGA groups plus funded food safety deregulation lobbying efforts.

Another terrific resource is Katelyn Jetelina of the Substack newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist. Along with regular updates, Jetelina and her team provide explainers and answers to top 10 questions including is local produce safer and can pets get this?

I also learned a lot from this NBC5 Chicago interview with an expert from IIT’s Institute for Food Safety and Health, who among other things, recommended buying your lettuce at the local farmer’s market.

Kennedy’s Distractions

While so many journalists and experts are covering this ongoing story, Trump’s government fired the talent that would have contained the outbreak. Now they can’t be trusted to provide information or to take steps to protect us. That includes the federal government’s top health official — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. — who’s no help at all in getting reliable information.

Kennedy has made only one public comment about cyclospora and it was misleading at best. At the end of a news conference about a completely different topic, Kennedy claimed the cyclosporiasis outbreak was “under control” (it’s not) and that DOGE cutbacks to food safety programs are not to blame (they are).

Instead of helping Americans understand the growing cyclospora outbreak, Kennedy spent the last few weeks talking about orange juice, peptide injections, dental fillings … and his new TikTok account. He only mentioned cyclospora because a reporter asked him about it, not because he deemed the problem serious enough to hold a press briefing. Despite both the actual risk and Americans’ growing concerns, neither Kennedy nor anyone from health agencies he oversees has bothered to address the American people directly on cyclosporiasis.

Some of the information we do get from the FDA and the CDC — two of the lead agencies dealing with food borne contaminates — has been just as confusing as what we’ve heard from Kennedy himself. Now Politico is reporting that a former FDA deputy commissioner is calling for an independent investigation into how badly Kennedy and his teams have mismanaged all of this. Frank Yiannas said “... it is starting to approach a catastrophic level in terms of how mismanaged it’s been on multiple fronts.”

The Outbreak Isn’t Under Control

Deborah Blum is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Poison Squad, which details the beginnings of the country’s food and consumer safety protection efforts. I asked her what she made of RFK Jr.’s response to this new health crisis. She told me:

“Well, I do not think an HHS secretary should be saying that an outbreak is under control when it so clearly isn’t. CDC expanded its investigation from five states to nine today (Friday). Taylor Farms’ recall, such as it is, applies in 27 states but there have been illnesses in many more than that. More than 10,000 cases of cyclospora infections have been recorded and that’s undoubtedly an estimate as people with mild cases often don’t go into the medical system. We haven’t even identified all the produce involved yet. I don’t know how he says that with a straight face.

What he should be saying is that we’ve made this a top priority, we’re putting extra resources into it, we’re determined to figure it out. Your food safety is a top concern of this administration. Not that this would necessarily be true but it would be an appropriate public health response.”

Blum’s also not buying Kennedy’s claims that DOGE cuts to food safety programs have no impact on the government’s response to the outbreak. She said:

“This is the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades so I think that’s definitely part of it. The CDC’s FoodNet program that was slashed included proactive monitoring for cyclospora which is a big deal because as I’m sure you read, it’s a very difficult organism to isolate once it has entered the food supply. And all the food safety programs are severely understaffed at the moment.”

We are in the midst of the biggest measles outbreak since … oh wait, that’s the other health-related disaster Kennedy doesn’t want to talk about. Americans once could count on their government — no matter who was president — to monitor our food for pathogens, to issue timely recalls, to inform us on risks, to provide guidance on how to avoid those risks, and to offer the best medical counsel about what to do if we became ill.

Because Donald Trump put his faith in Elon Musk’s DOGE program and Robert Kennedy’s sniff-the-cocaine-off-the-toilet-seat leadership, America’s federal government no longer provides any of these benefits. Luckily, we can count on robust news coverage to help us navigate this sh*t show.

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Newsletters

Loser of the Year!

Sam Osterhout · December 8, 2025

De Tocqueville said, “If men are to remain civilized, the art of associating together must grow and improve.” Calling the other side a bunch of Losers might, I admit, go against the spirit of artful association, as de Tocqueville intended.

Read full story

A guest post by Jennifer Schulze ✨ I'm a former local TV news exec, reporter & producer with a few opinions about the news✨ ⚡️Past: KING5Seattle | WGNMorningNews | WGNNews | WCIA3 |NBC5Chicago |ABC7Chicago | Chicago Sun-Times 🔥Bluesky @NewsJennifer

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Who DOGE Hurts: Gutting NOAA Joyce Vance On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration's "reductions in force" directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep. In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it. Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse. Saturday was even worse. Here in Birmingham, the alerts started midday. At 12:27 pm, I got the first alert through the UA campus system, telling me that in light of what was expected, I should seek shelter now instead of waiting for an actual tornado warning. The system sends alerts after the National Weather Service makes the call about what to expect. The National Weather Service (NWS) is a component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We’ve grown accustomed to getting this level of detail. NOAA’s information gets pushed out ahead of these events, causing people to plan in advance. Hard helmets were in short supply here yesterday as people prepared for the storms. We were relatively lucky in Birmingham. But other places were far less fortunate. By Saturday morning, ABC News reported 36 people were dead in the wake of the storms. This was what the devastation looked like in Tylertown, Mississippi. As I’m writing this, the storm is heading east into Georgia. How much worse would it have been without the accurate forecasting that let our local news people and local emergency systems warn folks in the storms’ paths sufficiently in advance to get to their safe places? As much as I don’t like to think about it, if Trump and DOGE stay on their current path, we are going to be forced to. Mother Nature doesn’t care who you voted for. If there’s a tornado headed your direction, you need access to early warning systems. Gutting NOAA means you won’t have that. An example of the tornado warnings issued by National Weather Services offices in Alabama throughout the day Saturday, permitting people to find shelter and take cover in advance. At 8:52 p.m., local television in central Alabama pushed out a message from the National Weather Service: Talladega, take cover now. It was a tornado on the ground near the famous Superspeedway. Alerts meant people were able to stay safe, which is a good thing—this photo of a bus that ended up on the roof of a nearby high school makes it clear that these early warning systems are critically important. What happens if the National Weather Service is no longer there to do that? Apparently, the Trump administration is not concerned with that. ABC is reporting that NOAA is down about 2,000 employees since January “as a result of the first round of the Trump administration's cuts.” California Congressman Jared Huffman, who chairs one of the relevant House subcommittees, said, "There is no way to absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting into these core missions. This is not about efficiency and it's certainly not about waste, fraud and abuse. This is taking programs that people depend on to save lives and emasculating them." Cuts that sound like a good idea to Elon Musk and Donald Trump have real impacts on the rest of us. That is only just beginning to dawn on people, who I’m sure you’re hearing, like I am, saying, “But I didn’t vote for this.” Trump 2.0, as I’ve written previously, isn’t a pick-your-own-adventure experience. You go to the carnival, you get all of the rides. We were fortunate last night. Everyone in our house (chickens included) is okay, we just have a little cleanup to do. But so many people weren’t that lucky. They lost houses and lives. They will need support from FEMA and other federal services. If DOGE continues its romp through essential federal work that we, as taxpayers, fund and rely on, it’s only going to get worse. When will Republicans wake up? Will their Senators and members of Congress protest what DOGE is doing? Will they even fight for their own backyards? If they continue to bend the knee on this, then instead of demanding that government work for their constituents, they are permitting it to work for the financial interests of the powerful. We know what to do about this. With this piece, and the one Friday night about an Idaho Fair Housing Council that I hope you’ll go back and read if you missed it, we’re putting a face on the people DOGE hurts. It’s not about waste and fraud; it’s about people. People who need their government to work for them. Here’s the phone number for the House switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Here’s that number for the Senate: (202) 224-3121. Make sure your representatives know how you feel. Thank you for being part of Civil Discourse. Your support makes the newsletter happen, and your questions, ideas, and suggestions are the inspiration behind it. So, I have a favor to ask. If you aren’t already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For $6 a month or $50 a year, you can contribute towards the resources it takes to research and write the newsletter. As Americans, we’re all trying to answer the question, “What can I do to help save our democracy?” My hope is that Civil Discourse provides you with the information and ideas you need to be part of holding the line. More than 590,000 people subscribe to Civil Discourse, and that number grows every day. We’re in this together, Joyce

 

Dispatches of alarm and hope, on politics and society, democracy and justice. Because silence is not an option. We may read and write alone, but we drive change together.

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A Lawless President's Contempt

The crisis facing our democracy is escalating. How long will the courts and the people stand for it?

Steven Beschloss Mar 17

In the courtroom where he was convicted of 34 felony counts last May. (Photo by Justin Lane via Getty Images

So 77 million Americans voted for a vengeful convicted felon who’s pursued a life of crime and promised he’d exploit the presidency for retribution. No one should be surprised that this sociopath, provided near-total immunity by the U.S. Supreme Court if elected again, is now acting in an utterly lawless manner.

The crisis to our constitutional democracy and the rule of law is escalating. The evidence is mounting, as the Trump regime defies court orders meant to check its power. Two deportation cases in the last few days underscore their belief that they can flagrantly flout the law. The question is how and if they will be held accountable.

On Friday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. This 1798 law, only intended to be used during wartime, was last employed during WWII to justify the mass internment of Japanese-Americans as well as Germans and Italians. Trump ordered the deportation of alleged members of a Venezuelan gang, proclaiming they were “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the U.S.

Despite U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling to halt the deportation before further argument—indeed, to provide them due process—a reported 238 of the Venezuelans were put on an airplane headed for El Salvador. The judge also ordered that the deportation flights return to America.

But not only was this ignored—a Justice Department official later claiming they were not obliged to return because the planes were “outside of U.S. airspace”—El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, working with the Trump regime, mocked the order. He posted on X, “Oopsie…Too late,” along with a laughing emoji and a video of the deported men in shackles being removed from the planes. Attorney General Pam Bondi—without evidence—was quick to call all the deported men “terrorists.”

Soon they were being taken to a notorious prison where prisoners reportedly sleep without sheets or mattresses and can only eat with their hands. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear that all this is fine with him. “Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele,” he posted on X.

I asked leading pro-democracy lawyer Marc Elias where this case goes now. “The next step is to see if judges start holding the administration officials in contempt,” he told me. Elias succinctly summarized the stakes in his latest article for his newsletter, Democracy Docket:

Our system of government rests on the expectation that those in power will faithfully uphold and execute the law. That is the oath the president takes, and it is a core value underpinning government service. Once that principle is abandoned, democracy and the rule of law are doomed.

So far, no government official has explicitly told a judge they will not comply with an order. No judge has yet taken the extraordinary step of holding a government official or Department of Justice lawyer in contempt.

That might change if Judge Boasberg refuses to tolerate the administration’s defiance of the law. As Elias writes, “With each passing week, the administration grows more disdainful of the courts, and judges are becoming angrier.”

Another deportation case over the weekend confirms this. Far from Trump’s once-upon-a-time, oft-repeated lie that he was only focused on deporting criminals, a Lebanese doctor, kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor with a legal visa was detained and subsequently deported back to Lebanon.

Despite a federal judge’s order to give the court 48 hours’ notice, Dr. Rasha Alawieh was put on a flight to Paris. She is a medical professional in an area facing a shortage, whose credentials include several American medical fellowships and a residency at Yale. Yesterday, Judge Leo Sorokin filed a second order suggesting U.S. Customs and Border protection had disobeyed his previous order and demanded that the agency respond to his “serious allegations.”

This was inevitable. Let’s return for a moment to the wise and tragically prescient words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissenting opinion after the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority voted to provide the president near-total immunity from prosecution. “The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding, she wrote last July. “This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation.”

Donald Trump has now pointed that loaded weapon straight at us. Our democracy is teetering on the edge of survival. As the full damage of the immunity ruling becomes painfully clearer—as does the culpability of Chief Justice John Roberts who penned the decision—it’s worth remembering that Justice Sotomayor and others understood what they had done. Let’s return one more time to Sotomayor’s searing indictment, which offers consolation only insofar as the truth was both knowable and avoidable:

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President…the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

But let’s not end here. Let’s take a lesson from a growing number of citizens in Eastern Europe who are refusing to remain silent amid corruption and authoritarian rule.

Over the weekend, more than 100,000 people in a student-led demonstration filled the streets in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, to protest against the corruption and incompetence of Serbia’s pro-Putin, autocratic president, Aleksandar Vučić. Meanwhile, some 50,000 demonstrators took to the streets in Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to protest against the 15-year rule of Hungary’s authoritarian ruler, Viktor Orbán, and support rising opposition figure, Péter Magyar.

Talking about the corruption of Orbán’s government, Magyar said, “They look down on and exploit the Hungarian people, stun and divide them, and turn them against each other. In the meantime, they laugh arrogantly in our faces.”

Sound familiar?

“Those who cheat on their own nation should end up in the dustbin of history,” Magyar told the determined crowd standing in the rain. “Our time has come.”

And what time is it in America? I’m hearing from more and more people who are joining the Tesla protests against Elon Musk and his so-called DOGE cuts around the country. That included more than 80 demonstrations on Saturday at Tesla dealerships around the country, part of a “Tesla Takedown” movement that urges owners and investors to “sell your Teslas, dump your stock, join the picket lines.” One of my good friends, who used to love his Tesla car, sold it last week because he couldn’t stand being connected in any way to Musk.

The opposition is making a difference: The electric vehicle company’s stock has fallen by half since mid-December and about 30 percent in the last month since the demonstrations began. If the downward spiral continues, Musk may eventually decide he’s had enough of the public’s rejection.

As the hostility of this regime toward the law intensifies, I expect more Americans will be taking to the streets. Ultimately, that may be the difference between the survival of our democracy or the prosperity of an authoritarian, oligarchic regime that treats the American people with nothing but contempt.

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