Buy Me a Vino Tinto

Share

Subscribe now

By now, if you are a regular reader of THE PUGILIST, you know that there’s this guy named Gary King. He’s worn a lot of hats, and most of them, he worn for money, in the presence of his pal Jeffrey Epstein. Gary’s dad Bruce King was thrice the governor of New Mexico, and his family sold Epstein the land that became the Zorro rape ranch. I’ve reported here that Gary was a two-time New Mexico Attorney General, and that he never investigated Epstein for jack shit, even after he knew Epstein had been convicted of child sex trafficking in Florida. Quite the opposite. After Epstein got out, Gary worked with his legal team to make sure Epstein could still donate to Gary, but through shell companies so reporters and the public would not find out. That Gary. You know, the one who also lied about not knowing the private chartered plane he flew on from New Mexico to Washington DC while running for governor was paid for by Epstein. When the files dropped in January, there was an email from Gary’s people asking Jeff’s people for the plane, on orders from Gary. Meaning: Gary’s a liar who hangs out with and takes bribes from pedophiles.

Welp. I have learned a lot more about Gary in recent days. I did not know, for instance, that he was initially a scientist. PhD in organic chemistry. Nor did I know that after his first political stint — 12 years as a New Mexico state representative — he worked as the Assistant U.S. Secretary for Environmental Management under Bill Richardson, who was the U.S. Secretary for the Dept. of Energy under Bill Clinton and would move on from there to become governor of New Mexico. All three of these men are named in the Epstein files by numerous survivors as either having abused them with Epstein or known about the abuse and ignored it.

I don’t want to talk about him today, though. The person I want to tell you about today is Gary King’s wife. Yolanda Jones King. You know, the woman who pretty much invented Directed Energy Weapons. No, I’m not kidding. I wish I were.

Fun fact: The world’s epicenter of directed energy weapons research, testing and manufacturing is Albuquerque, New Mexico. My hometown and, when I left, 37 miles from where I was living. While “directed energy weapon” might sound like some kind of futuristic sci-fi fantasy to people who do not understand what is actually being developed and produced in New Mexico with their tax dollars, the weapons are very real and they are not only the large-scale weapons of war by the same name. They are also small and personal, now. Some have been shrunk to the size of a backpack and can be fired with something like a gun trigger. Others can fit in the back of a rented moving truck and can be controlled remotely. Some operate from drones hovering high enough to avoid detection. They can home in on a target through almost any substance, with such precision and extraordinary tracking that they could be destroying one person’s ear drum in a room of 20 people and no one else in the vicinity would notice anything. They are weapons of Gaslighting Pain, designed to cause maximum harm with minimum accountability or evidence — and this is intentional. They are being secretly sold to law enforcement agencies in the United States coast to coast by private defense contractors, most of them in New Mexico, as we speak. A recent article in a defense industry trade magazine suggested they’d be the perfect “non-lethal” tools for ICE. They’re being used right now in policing situations. Some burn people’s skin and are designed to “break up crowds.” Others penetrate the small pressurized canals in the inner ear, to create tiny air bubbles that can cause deafness and brain damage.

And Yolanda Jones King invented and patented the technology used to make them possible.

First off, she is NOT the Yolanda King who is the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and you know this because Dr. King’s daughter has devoted her life to making the world a better place, and Gary’s wife has done the opposite of that.

Way back in 1981, Yolanda Jones King earned a doctorate in the kinetics of high-energy chemical lasers. In 1981, people. When the average American’s relationship to a laser was a blue beam over the crowd at a Rush concert. Yolanda wasn’t at that concert, I’m guessing, because she was busy studying how to wring weaponizable light out of a chemical reaction, which is a genuinely weird thing to be extremely good at, and she was doing it in a field where — and I say this with all the love Yolanda deserves from me these days — everyone else in the room was a man who owned exactly one turtleneck. Except maybe Gary. He came from money. He probably had twenty turtlenecks.

Yolanda’s actual specialty, the thing she patented, was beam sensing. Beam sensing is the deeply unglamorous science of knowing where your laser is pointed. Which sounds obvious until you realize that a directed-energy weapon you cannot precisely aim is not a weapon, it is a four-hundred-million-dollar flashlight. Somebody has to make sure the death ray knows where the death is supposed to go, and for literally decades in this country, that somebody was substantially her. The evil Yolanda King, photo negative of the good Yolanda King.

So she does this weird, horrible, complicated, ingenious thing at the Air Force weapons complex. Then she moves into the Strategic Defense Initiative — “Star Wars,” the Reagan program to shoot missiles out of the sky with space lasers, a plan so ambitious it was basically fan fiction with a defense budget — and she becomes a program manager running Ballistic Missile Defense projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Then space-based radar. Then the international office. Then she chairs a NATO sensors and electronics panel across two terms as, by the honoring institutions’ own account, the only woman ever to do it. Elected an AIAA Fellow in 2003. Retired in 2014.

I’m giving you the résumé fast because I want the shape of it to hit you all at once, like a precision laser beam: this is a person who spent her entire life at the technical heart of America’s effort to sense, aim, and fire energy as a weapon, and who was and is, by every available measure, extremely good at it.

Now. Where did all of this happen? Guess. I’ll give you a hint. It’s my hometown, because of course it fucking is.

It happened in Albuquerque, which — and most of the country does not know this — is the national capital of directed-energy weapons. I’m not being cute. Kirtland Air Force Base is home to the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate, the Department of the Air Force’s official center of excellence for the field: a budget north of three hundred million dollars, some eight hundred people, thousands of acres, all of it organized around lasers, high-power electromagnetics, and “electro-optics for space superiority,” which is a phrase I would like on a T-shirt I would never wear. Down the road a couple of blocks, Sandia National Laboratories. Up on the base, a telescope range pointing adaptive optics at the sky. This is a city where you can get world-class green chile and, apparently, get your satellite optics calibrated, and nobody thinks the combination is strange.

And that complex has a lineage — Air Force Weapons Laboratory, then Phillips Laboratory, then AFRL — which is the exact, in-order sequence of institutions on Yolanda Jones King’s résumé. She didn’t just work in the field. She came up inside it, in the specific town, at the specific moment it was being built. Her biography and Albuquerque’s identity are the same object photographed from two distances. Yolanda Jones King IS directed energy weaponry. It would not exist without her.

And she’s married to Gary King, a seemingly corrupt and dishonest friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s who the New Mexico press has never really covered honestly, because he himself is a sort of royalty, born into a wealthy ranching and political dynasty in a state that is run like Tammany Hall, plus bolo ties.

Yolanda met Gary King in 1978, at a campaign event for Gary’s father, Bruce King, a rancher-politician who would serve three terms as governor. They were both chemistry students. They married in 1987, the year Lauren Sanchez and I both graduated from Del Norte High School. And a local paper, given the gift of a scientist marrying a scientist, ran the story under a headline about how for these two, it really was chemistry — a pun so proud of itself I have to respect it as much as I respect Gary King (which ain’t much). Gary King went on to become the state’s attorney general. Twice. Its top law enforcement officer. And he never, not once, investigated the man his dad sold Zorro Ranch to. Instead, he socialized with him, took donations from him, and was one of several King names in Gary’s little black book. So was Yolanda.

Multiple women have said publicly that Epstein abused them as teenagers or young women at that ranch, and those allegations were never fully investigated by anyone.

In 2006, an Epstein entity gave Gary King’s first attorney-general campaign fifteen thousand dollars, which he said he returned after Epstein’s arrest, though a local news outlet found no evidence it was true. In 2008 Epstein pleaded guilty and became, on the record, a convicted sex offender. And Gary King — again, the state’s chief law enforcement officer — never opened an investigation into him. Instead, per an email in the files, a staffer in King’s own office used an official government account in 2010 to set up a lunch between Epstein and “AG Gary King” at a Santa Fe restaurant. Just two creeps, hanging out together in the Fe. Two years after the guilty plea. A working lunch. Attorney general’s office letterhead energy.

Then 2014, King runs for governor, on a platform — I want to be precise — of prosecuting crimes against children. And according to the files, he solicits Epstein’s fundraising help; Epstein pledges to raise fifty thousand dollars; and King’s own email lays out, helpfully, how each separate corporation and PAC can chip in up to the legal max. It reads like a compliance seminar. Then Epstein’s attorney suggests routing the donations through Epstein’s companies and trusts specifically to spare King “additional press coverage” for taking money from a convicted sex offender while running against convicted sex offenders. And Epstein says: sure. And the money arrives — over fifteen thousand dollars through Epstein entities like JEGE LLC and Maple, Inc. King said publicly he’d return it or give it to charity. The filings show no evidence he did.

And then — I promise this is the last one — there’s the plane. September 2014, King and his running mate for lieutenant governor, Deb Haaland, later a U.S. congresswoman and Interior Secretary, fly from Santa Fe to Washington on a private jet chartered through Epstein’s JEGE LLC. When the files surfaced, King told reporters he had no idea the plane was connected to Epstein and pointed at former Governor Bill Richardson and his own staff. The emails show King himself reaching out to arrange it. New Mexico Political Report concluded, flatly, that his account was not truthful.

I have to be honest, “I didn’t know it was Epstein’s jet” is a top-tier excuse, because it presumes a world in which a man of his position boards private aircraft the way the rest of us board a city bus. No inspection. No questions. You just get on the flying thing as a candidate for governor, with no idea who owns it or who paid for it, and hope for the best.

I wrote about all this earlier this year, and immediately started having weird shit happen to me. Threats, break-ins. I’ve written about all this before. The harassment and threats escalated for a couple of months. I did not stop reporting on these people.

Then one day, as I sat at my desk in my home office writing, I was suddenly overcome with debilitating symptoms unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I heard a specific and strange, faint, very high pitched whine, coming from outside, in the direction of the roof of the empty house across the street, and within a split second, both of my ears simultaneously felt full and fuzzy and my hearing went muffled, and then my brain in the back of my head felt like it was on fire. It was unreal. I stood up and tried to walk out to where my son was, thinking maybe it was a stroke, to see if he could call for help. That’s when my neck and the sides of my face by my ears felt on fire. My inner ears felt like they were singed. My thinking went dull and foggy. I lost my balance. When labs were later done, my bloodwork showed markers similar to someone who has been exposed to radiation in high doses. When I googled and sought medical help, the signs all pointed to having been hit by a small-scale directed energy weapons. It happened several more times, and in each subsequent instance there was either a large unmarked van or a Penske moving truck parked directly next to my house — a rarity where I was living, on a small rural cul de sac in the middle of nowhere. When the moving truck was there, no one on our street was moving, and a man got out of the back of the truck after it stopped, having been riding where the furniture should have been, and he and the driver took cover on the side of the truck opposite my house as I watched them through a window. Then I was hit with the severe pain again, and dropped to my knees. They quickly got into their truck and drove away, never to be seen again. No one on the street knew who they were.

Now, I am not saying Yolanda had anything to do with any of that. I am merely pointing out the coincidences. If that is in fact what hit me, it is a very strange coincidence that it happened after I wrote some damning stories about several of the still most powerful people in New Mexico, one of whom just happens to have been great friends with Jeffrey Epstein, and also is married to the woman who invented the main technology used to make directed energy weapons. She continues to work, to this day, for private defense contracting companies in Albuquerque that develop, design, test and manufacture DEWs. It is her literal job. And I did NOT know this until AFTER the attacks on me.

Maybe all of these things are unrelated.

But I left the United States for good, just in case they weren’t.

I hope this is the last piece I have to write in the political investigation portion of this newsletter that includes me in it.

And I fully intend to continue to write about all of them, albeit from Spain.

Sources, because the jokes are free but the claims are load-bearing: on Yolanda Jones King’s career and honors — her Wikipedia entry, her New Mexico Tech regent biography, the New Mexico Network for Women in Science and Engineering, and UNM’s Alumni Association (2003 Zia Award). On Albuquerque’s directed-energy complex — the AFRL Directed Energy Directorate and Kirtland fact sheets, plus the Phillips Laboratory entry. On the Epstein matters — reporting by New Mexico Political Report (Pat Davis, Julian Paras), KOB, KRQE, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Santa Fe New Mexican, drawn from the February 2026 Epstein file release, and the current Gary King Wikipedia entry. Characterizations of intent and truthfulness are attributed to that reporting, not asserted independently.

Veteran and respected investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulizter Prize in 1970 for reporting on the United States government’s coverup of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, just published an article on Substack that says the Epstein Files are being withheld from the public by both prominent political parties in the United States because Epstein was an asset for both the Israeli intelligence organization Mossad and the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), but stops short of saying Epstein also worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

This is similar to what I was surprised to have uncovered in my reporting on the coverup and protection of Jeffrey Epstein in my home state of New Mexico by powerful local law enforcement and political figures, many of whom are still in power.

Unlike Hersh’s conclusions, however, my conclusions indicate Epstein was also an asset of the CIA. The extreme harassment and physical attacks against me only began after I published a headline that said exactly that, which, if you’re trying to convince me I was WRONG about that, is a lousy strategy.

Regardless, I am glad to finally see someone of Hersh’s caliber reporting — albeit behind a paywall — that Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring and financial favors were not just the oddities of one depraved pedophile “financier” and his sparkly, quirky heiress girlfriend, but rather the modus operandi of United States and Israeli joint intelligence agencies conspiring to control powerful people in our own and foreign governments, royalty, banking and business, by using illegal sex acts and bribes to blackmail them into compliance, with compliance likely including sneaking nuclear weapons secrets to Israel out of New Mexico’s weapons labs. Full. Stop.

The entire United States government does not want its citizens to know any of this, because it would not be something most Americans would or could tolerate.

While the American public seems to have an insanely high tolerance for violence against migrants and criminalized Others, there does seem to be some sort of a line for most of them, drawn at “trafficking defenseless white American girls to rich men to blackmail them, and using our tax dollars to do it.” This is why no president has released the complete files or ever will. This is why the New Mexico Epstein “Truth” Commission is actually the opposite of truth. This is why I got hit with a directed energy weapon and run out of my own country, and then had that experience gaslit by Democrat-funding fake-news outlets on Substack. Neither party wants the files released, because, let’s face it: Neither party is really in charge of anything. Intelligence agencies are in charge. Ours, and Israel’s. With the help of Palantir.

A couple of weeks ago, I started getting a bunch of ranting, borderline-unhinged-sounding emails from a person who said they were an old guy in Santa Fe. They started with him asking me, repeatedly, for the details of my Paypal account so that he could send me $500. I did not respond.

I don’t use Paypal because years ago, when I owned a small scone bakery that supplied pastries to Albuquerque-area coffeeshops, that Paypal was hacked and used to clean out my entire bank account.

I ignored the emails, because I unfortunately get a lot of loony emails from a lot of people. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could have made enough money with the bakery to just spend my days making scones.

The same man continued to email me, despite my lack of response, this time to say he loved my work and had reached out to Seymour Hersh on my behalf, to ask him to work with me. He then sent me what he said was the reply from Hersh, saying something about how he would love to meet me and would be happy to fly out to wherever I was now to meet me, that I seemed to have the information he was lacking to put together all the pieces of an Epstein puzzle he was working on, that if I agreed to meet Hersh I would be rewarded by Hersh introducing me to “the most powerful literary agents in New York.”

I read it all, and felt a deep and dreadful unease.

First of all, I am not about to give any strangers my exact address right now — and this request to come meet me came at the same time several other entities, including my former literary agency in New York, the one that had connected me to a Zionist Hollywood go-agent who ghosted me the second I defending Palestinians, was suddenly trying to get my new address in Spain from me to send me two boxes of book that had been returned to them from one of my old addresses two years ago. Yeah, no.

Second, the idea that I would WANT to be introduced to the most powerful literary agents in New York was laughable. Been there, done that, never again, thanks. They’re almost all Zionists. They work with Zionist producers and executives in Hollywood, to catch and kill the kinds of books and stories I write, to control and destroy people like me. I am blacklisted in the New York publishing world and in Hollywood because of my outspoken stance on genocide always being wrong, even when Israel commits it.

So, naturally, I did not answer the old man in Santa Fe, even when he dangled Seymour Hersh and New York literary agents in front of me like some clueless carrot. (I created my own publishing company and digital news magazine in the past couple of years precisely because I do NOT want to work with the establishment in New York anymore.)

A few days passed, and the same guy then sent me an email that sounded like every email every woman who rejected an entitled narcissistic man of any kind has ever gotten — telling me things like “oh, you think you’re too good to answer me, huh?” and “I gave you $500, that should grant me access to you” and “at least an acknowledgement you got these emails,” the “bitch” was implied. Dear reader, this man never sent me money. But if he had, that would have been his choice and certainly not a ticket to enter my life nor find out where I live.

I mention all of this because the timing of … All Of This … seems off.

Why does Hersh, in this new article, go out of his way to say in his headline that Epstein was Mossad and FBI but not CIA? When paired with the strange emails from the supposed guy in Santa Fe, and his forwarded emails from the supposed Seymour Hersh, teamed up with the multiple attempts from multiple angles to figure out exactly where I am right now, after moving to another continent for safety … it all feels a bit … no se que.

That said, I am glad a famous and respected reporter like Hersh, a man with the accolades and institutional backing to be taken seriously by the rest of the corporate news media world, is finally saying what has been glaringly obvious to anyone who bothered to look.

Jeffrey Epstein was one of “ours.” And his child sex trafficking ring was OUR child sex trafficking ring.

That’s why you’re never getting the files. Because the horrors therin were the product of you own tax dollars, your own government, your own intelligence agencies. Because they are proof that the nation that for decades has done obscenities and atrocities to countless Others around the world was also fully capable of doing the same thing to its own people. The Epstein Files are the smoking gun that points to the moment the United States stopped belonging to its own people are began belonging to Israel and global oligarchs.

The files are not being withheld, as the DNC would like you to believe, just to protect Trump. It’s to protect the entire United States intelligence and defense community. It’s to protect the entire IDEA of what the United States even is.

In other words, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell operated a child-and-adult sex trafficking ring and Other Means of Bribery for decades, with the knowledge and support of the intelligence agencies of the United States of America and Israel. Even Seymour Hersh says so.

Maybe now, I won’t be the only voice out there willing to say it plainly.

Maybe now, your favorite “independent” journalists who have only been focusing on WHAT Epstein did will finally have the guts to talk about the terrifying WHY he did it at all: Because Uncle Sam and Israel wanted him to.

Leave a Tip

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Share

Tip Jar!

Andrea Romero has a talent for finding public money and a habit of not being able to explain how she ended up holding it.

The Santa Fe Democrat — state representative, chair of the New Mexico Truth Commission supposedly investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, and, as of this week, the subject of a Republican demand for a criminal investigation — has quietly been drawing a second government paycheck since May. Since then, while sitting in the Legislature and steering a $2 million taxpayer-funded probe that hired a law firm whose partners had repeatedly donated to her own campaigns, Romero has also been on the payroll of the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office, a fact that, in the words of Santa Fe New Mexican reporter Phaedra Haywood, “appears not to have been widely known prior to this week.”

There is a reason it wasn’t advertised. The state’s own lawyers say she isn’t allowed to have the job at all.

The job the state says she can’t hold

The New Mexico Department of Justice could not have been clearer. Its chief of staff, Lauren Rodriguez, told the New Mexican that the office had advised both the Legislature and the DA’s office in late 2025 that sitting legislators are prohibited from working as assistant district attorneys. State law, she said, “bars any legislator from receiving compensation as a state employee and bars any state officer from compensating a legislator for their services.” As for Romero’s arrangement: “no such exemption exists for legislators serving as either full-time or part-time employees of a district attorney’s office.”

Romero says she got a green light. She told the New Mexican she asked Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s office whether she could take the job and interpreted the response as approval — then pasted a block of text into an email to the paper that, conveniently, carried no date and no signature. That text leaned on AG Opinion 2024-04, the opinion Torrez issued in the matter of Rep. Andrea Reeb’s stint as special prosecutor in the Alec Baldwin Rust case. But that opinion turned on a narrow point: a special prosecutor’s power is “only temporary or occasional.” It did not bless a legislator taking a standing, salaried job in a DA’s office. The DOJ says so directly.

So we are left with two branches of state government describing the same job in incompatible terms — and a legislator who would like us to believe the confusion is everyone’s fault but hers.

Please bear in mind, too, that Romero was named by other members of the commission as the person who quietly erased all mention of the current Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Deb Haaland, from any mention in the Truth Commission’s first report, released earlier this month. Haaland is named in the Epstein Files as a passenger on a private plane chartered by Epstein at the request of former New Mexico Attorney General Gary King, then running for governor, with Haaland, then, running for lieutenant governor. Epstein bought Zorro Ranch from King’s family and never investigated Epstein during his two terms as the state’s attorney general.

What, exactly, is the job Romero took?

Here the story gets slippery in a way that should be familiar to anyone who has followed Romero’s career.

District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies’s May 12 offer letter hired Romero as an “Assistant District Attorney” — precisely the title a legislator is barred from holding under the 2024 opinion. The same letter conceded the problem in advance, making the offer “contingent upon ... [an] ethics check due to your position as a State Representative in the New Mexico legislature.”

By this week, the office’s story had changed. A DA spokesperson now says Romero is an “Assistant Trial Attorney in a non-court facing role” who “does not sign pleadings or represent the state in court.” Except the public job posting for that very position states the opposite: “This position represents the State of New Mexico in criminal proceedings.” Asked to reconcile the offer letter, the posting, and the new description — and to say whether a unique position had been created for Romero — the office did not answer.

Then there is the money. The state Sunshine Portal lists Romero’s salary at roughly $94,000 a year; she says that figure would apply only if the role were full-time. At the $48-an-hour rate the office quotes, a full-time schedule works out to about $99,000 — more than the roughly $94,000 paid to other assistant trial attorneys in the office, some with more experience than Romero, who finished law school in 2022 and whose own account of her legal background is limited to part-time work at a civil firm. Her résumé before the law, as her campaign site tells it, runs to international development work in Mozambique and ostrich farming.

A newly minted attorney, paid at the top of the scale, in a job the state says she legally cannot hold, at an office whose budget she can vote on. Romero’s summary: “I think it’s pretty straightforward. It’s a part-time job.”

The conflict she keeps not seeing

Strip away the title dispute and two conflicts remain, and neither is technical.

The first is separation of powers — the constitutional boundary between the branches that keeps a lawmaker from also drawing a check from the prosecutorial arm of the executive. The second is more basic: Romero, as a legislator, helps set the budget of the very office now signing her paychecks. That is the definition of a conflict of interest, and no green light, real or imagined, makes it disappear.

House Republican Whip Alan Martinez has asked Torrez to investigate whether Romero broke the law by taking the job, and to examine Carmack-Altwies’s role in “authorizing or facilitating Romero’s employment and compensation.” “This is not a technical ethics question that can be brushed aside,” Martinez said. “If these laws were violated, New Mexicans deserve answers and accountability.”

He’s right that it can’t be brushed aside. The question is whether anyone with the power to act will decline to.

A pattern, not an incident

None of this is new territory for Romero, which is the part her “part-time job” shrug is designed to make you forget.

Before she was ever elected, Romero ran the Regional Coalition of LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratories) Communities, a publicly funded agency drawing roughly $200,000 a year. In 2018 the New Mexico State Auditor released a special audit finding more than $51,500 in improper expenditure payments, including $26,862 paid to her own firm, Andrea Romero Consulting. The improper spending included expensive wine and liquor and Major League Baseball tickets — a $1,850 Washington, D.C., dinner reimbursed in full despite a coalition travel policy that flatly prohibited alcohol; $307 for a dozen ballgame tickets. A second, independent audit found after-the-fact accounting changes made to “correct deficiencies.” A nonprofit asked the attorney general to open a criminal investigation. Years later, the coalition was still trying to claw back roughly $8,000 from her; as of mid-2025 it remained unpaid, with the board signaling it would rather move on than keep chasing her. Romero’s defense then was the same as now: she’d followed the process, relied on others to catch problems, and the whole thing was politically motivated. It should be noted that her position was sold to the public as being a voice for the communities around the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories who were concerned about groundwater contamination and other issues, but in reality was a lobbying job in which Romero helped secure large federal contracts for the labs in question. The same labs also gave her a college scholarship fresh out of high school.

And her current perch carries its own unresolved questions — ones THE PUGILIST has documented at length. As chair of the Epstein Truth Commission, Romero voted to hand a $750,000 contract to Fadduol, Cluff, Hardy & Conaway, a personal-injury firm whose orbit had funneled campaign money her way: the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association’s PAC gave her $1,000 the month before her 2024 election, and the firm’s founders had earlier maxed out to her and donated to figures named in the Epstein files. She has declined to engage with that reporting, dismissing it to a constituent as “blog posts” too “filled with inaccuracies” to be worth the commission’s resources — without ever naming one.

That is the throughline. Every time Romero is caught standing where public money and public power intersect in ways she can’t cleanly justify, the answer is the same: it’s straightforward, it’s routine, someone else approved it, and her critics are playing politics. The audits, the offer letters, the job postings, the donation records and the state’s own legal opinions keep saying otherwise. But blame shifting is her superpower.

She asked, this spring, why she wanted a job in the justice system. She said she wanted to understand “how the system works and what it is we can do to improve it.”

If there were actually any justice in New Mexico’s legal system, she’d be finding out herself by now.

THE PUGILIST has requested comment from Rep. Romero, the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office, and the Attorney General’s office. No one responded.

To be clear, THE PUGILIST is non-partisan, and its owner, editor and head writer is a progressive democratic socialist, not a republican. The publication strives to hold power accountable for corruption, regardless of political party.

Tip Jar

Share

Subscribe now

Tips / Donations

Share

Subscribe now

Now that I’m settling into my new life in Europe, I’m finally allowing myself to think about some of the painful, weird things that went down right before I left the United States. Holy shit, that was a terrible time.

One of the trash things in particular has resurfaced, and that’s what I want to explore with you a bit today: Why beloved, smiley, aw-shucksy Substacker Ellie Leonard, serial whiny con-man Lev Parnas, some lunatic named Jay, and a bunch of other interconnected people on this app freaked the fuck out when I reported being harassed, threatened and physically attacked by powerful New Mexico politically connected people back in May. Most importantly, I wanted to know why these people, some of whom had seemingly been attempting to welcome me into their Epstein-reporting fold, suddenly did a batshit-crazy 180, and all jumped up in unison to try to discredit me about literally every fucking thing with exactly zero fucking evidence, at the precise moment I was running for my actual life.

So I’ve been digging around, connecting dots, doing what I do, trying to understand it. And holllllly shit, guys. Just. Damn. What I found out about this crowd is pretty disappointing, absolutely disgusting, and sort of shocking. It is going to upset a lot of people to hear this, because they love and trust Ellie Leonard. She’s the girl next door, the soccer mom, the gal pal you’d trust with your entire whose-ass life. Definitely scary stuff. But, in the end, not surprising, considering the era we live in and who, in fact, is controlling — sorry, bribing — the United States of America’s political class. When I tell the roots of this whole thing go back to Ohio, and Zionists, and money — does any of that ring a bell?

In that context, it all makes perfect, pathetic sense.

Back in May of this year, I first told my readers here on Substack that I’d likely been hit with some kind of directed energy weapon in my home in Rio Communities, New Mexico, and that I could only assume the physical attack, which was one of the most painful and disorienting things I’ve ever survived, was an escalation of other targeted harassment I’d been subjected to in the wake of uncovering several high profile powerful New Mexican politicians in the portion of the Epstein files released five months earlier.

Before the DEW attacks (there were multiples of them), I had been followed by unmarked dark-windowed SUVs, had unmarked vans stake out my driveway in the middle of the night, had my home had been broken into and items moved but not taken (in very weird, very obvious ways, to let me know they could get in, even when I was sleeping). Two of my friends had been called and threatened because of their association with me, one of them being a politician in the democratic party who was instructed by Brandon Padilla, campaign manager for Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury and a senior policy advisor for Democratic gubernatorial candidate (and likely the next NM governor) Deb Haaland, to shut me up. You’re friends with Alisa, right? We need you to get her to shut up.

No one was more shocked than I was, then, because I was a huge fan of the Democrats in New Mexico, because of all the good policies they’d passed. I had not imagined in a million years that any of them were involved with Epstein and Maxwell, nor that the involvement was, yes, about ignoring child sex trafficking, but also about foreign intelligence operations in our state, nuclear weapons labs, military secrets, defense contractors, foreign intelligence organizations, and huge HUGE sums of money. These were very dangerous connections, in a state with zero protections and many, many empty spaces where a woman could just be disappeared.

I knew that if I did not leave my house and become somewhat more difficult to reach, that the people who were escalating their attacks on me would likely continue to escalate. I also knew that there were only a few places left to go in escalating from directed energy weapon attacks.

So I let you all, my readers, know what was happening as it happened. If they did manage to kill or completely disable me, I wanted it on the record that it had been intentional.

So I told the world: I’d packed up all my belongings and put them into storage and was moving from safe house to safe house, from Airbnb and hotel to motel, while I organized my paperwork and tied up loose ends, until I could leave the country to try to start a new life somewhere with better protections for journalists.

No sooner had I posted this than readers began sending me screenshots of a mass email written and sent by someone named “Jay,” who they told me was an assistant to someone else named “Lev Parnas.” The email went out to Parnas’ readers and fans. It was clearly about me, and it told them not to believe a word I was saying because they had insider information that I was a grifter and that I was lying and had not been attacked by a DEW. How the fuck would anyone have insider information about something like that, considering that everything they said in that email was a lie? It was a stunning thing to read such a weird, disgusting lie about me, after just having been to the ER with my inner ears bleeding and my brain swelling, with my bloodwork bearing markers often seen with exposure to high doses of radiation, with burning in my head, neck, eyes, ears and kidneys that lasted for weeks, then months, and still is not over.

I was staying in an AirBnb in Albuquerque when I read it, and I responded to it as best I could, without really knowing who the fuck these people were.

While Lev Parnas was certain I should have heard of him, I hadn’t. When I found out who he was, I was stunned anyone trusted this ogre. Everything they suddenly accused me of, was actually true about him. He is a grifter. He is a criminal. He is a liar. He is a mafioso. He pretends to have had some sort of epiphany and suddenly became a Democrat dedicated to fighting Trump. So lots of you like him. But it’s bullshit, part of a whole controlled opposition narrative. And I said so. He didn’t like that.

The very act of responding to them inspired them to say it was proof that I wasn’t actually running for my life, because who has time to respond under a running for one’s life circumstance?

As I’ve recounted here, that entire week I was numb with shock, and desperately trying to keep my newsletter alive, as it was the only income I had. It wasn’t until I finally got somewhere safe, which is Spain, three months later, that my body let me start to feel anything at all. When you are actually running for your life, it turns out, your body goes into survival mode to protect you. You can’t feel. You can’t cry. You can only focus on the present moment. I was also trying to keep up an appearance of some degree of normalcy for the sake of my son, my family, my friends, and my pets.

Anyway. The whole thing blew up in ways I did not understand at the time, but that I understand now.

The first most surprising piece of it was that another Substacker who had been researching the Epstein Files and whom many people often compared me to, began to join in with Parnas and “Jay” to cast doubt, quite publicly, on my credibility. I’d been aware of Ellie for months. We all had. If you were on Substack and interested at all in the Epstein Files, she was literally everywhere. Everyone was suddenly platforming her, both “independent'“ media outlets and Substackers, and corporate legacy outlets alike. Legions of people had begun to show up in my comments, as my own newsletter climbed, sometimes to the No. 1 spot, the U.S. Politics Rising chart on Substack. Before the DEW attacks, I had been invited on live broadcasts with her, by people who all seemed to know each other loosely somehow, people I had not followed or really known about until they started reaching out to me — Wajahat Ali, Lev Shalev. Kait Justice’s name often got thrown into people’s comments, prior to the attack, with me and Ellie.

But I have to be honest. Something about Ellie Leonard rubbed me the wrong way from the start. I have almost a superpower for reading people, and quickly, the only bonus I got from growing up in a home with two narcissistically abusive parents. I’m hypervigilant and exquisitely attuned to people’s microexpressions. I can sense danger in a person with astounding accuracy. I can read insincerity and hidden hubris a mile off. And in Ellie Leonard there was… something. Something fake. Something awkward. Something arrogant. Something mean. She would smile for the camera, but the persona would drop for milliseconds when people said things she didn’t like. The eyes would flash cold and hard, the duckling becoming for a split second the rattlesnake.

One the one Substack Live I did with Ellie, on Waj’s show, there was a moment when I said something about how annoying I found it that some people online were referring to her, me and Kait as “soccer moms who just started investigating Epstein because we love kids.” It was insulting, I said, and sexist, and I said it to comfort and bond with Ellie, thinking she might also find it irritating. Her response was like a knife to my gut. She glared at me, and it was like a different person emerged, the true person beneath the smile. And I understood, in an instant sort of download, that she not only did not share my view, but that she was greatly bothered that I’d said what I said. I didn’t say so for a long time — until today, really — because so many of my devoted readers also absolutely love and trust her.

Now that I’ve had some time to sit with what’s happened since May — the way Ellie and Parnas have continued to bash me in lives and posts, without doing any actual reporting to see if there was any truth to what I’d said, just running what was clearly some sort of fuckedup damage control PR operation on me — I have a clear idea of who these people actually are, who they work for, who funds them, and why they were so desperately eager to at first befriend and platform me and then, later, discredit, discard and destroy me.

But before we get to that, let me tell you who Ellie Leonard is, and who she isn’t.

The digital online footprint for Ellie Leonard the Substacker is sparse, but in a very specific sort of way. Everything we are able to find out about her before 2022/2023 (and there is almost nothing) comes from her own self-reporting in online profiles or, in the case of one very odd profile of her in the New York Times in 2020, from… well, from that very odd profile of her in the New York Times, all about how she alone is managing to survive AI taking over her industry, and it talks about her like she’s someone everyone ought to already know. Remember this.

There is also a first-person “guest essay” about how she performed in a community theater Christmas play with chickenpox as a child, published in 2024 in the Sequim Gazette, a small newspaper in far northern Washington state. Such guest essays are not fact-checked nor vetted the way reported articles would be, and the photos that appear with it were provided by Ellie.

Leonard’s Facebook and Instagram accounts both magically appear only in 2022 or 2023. Her Substack suddenly appears in June of 2025. Her online profiles, self written, describe her as an author, writer and transcriptionist. There are no books or articles under her name before 2023 anywhere, and everything other than the self-penned “guest essay” in the Sequim Gazette that comes after is either on her own Substack or, as her sudden “grassroots” fame built over 2026, on other “independent media” outlets, most notably Blue Amp Media, where she was hired this year as an editor.

Ellie Leonard says she was born Eleanor Jane Leinart, and though she touts herself as a Montana person, she appears to have grown up in Port Angeles, Washington, where, if you believe the guest essay she penned for the Sequim Gazette, she went to Port Angeles High School. She has said Leinart is her maiden name and Leonard is her married name. She says her husband works for the railroads and is rarely home, and that the couple have four children.

People who work with her at Blue Amp Media have told me she would often attend remote work meetings with the children in the room as she was openly and loudly discussing child sexual assault and other horrific sex crimes from the Epstein files fully within earshot of her kids. A source who asked not to be named told me it happened often enough that she began to think there might be something not quite right about Leonard.

The story of Ellie Leonard as is told over and over again publicly by those who have her on their shows and interview her for their publications is that she is a professional transcriptionist, owner of an LLC called Red Pencil Transcriptions.

In Steve Lohr’s profile of Leonard, "In the Battle Against the Machines, She's Holding Her Ground," The New York Times, April 8, 2020, Technology section, he describes her in such glowing terms it almost reads like marketing copy. It also says she has a thriving business in Montana. But Montana state business filings show that Leonard’s LLC, Red Pencil Transcriptions, was voluntarily closed down in 2016. It was only reopened in 2023, but this time in East Rutherford, New Jersey, right around the same time her social media presence materializes out of nowhere.

Nothing about any of this reads, to me at least, as organic, natural or real. It reads more like the online presence of a intelligence construct. An empty digital footprint, that starts to get filled only in 2020, and then by a fawning piece that comes out of nowhere and lands in the New York fucking Times. how? I could not even begin to tell you whose construct she might be. I can not even say with any certainty that she’s a construct at all. It could very well be that she actually was a transcriptionist from Montana who somehow ended up getting her own profile in the New York Times, written by a veteran Pulitzer-winning journalist, just by chance. Or it could be a manifestation of the modern version of Operation Mockingbird.

It does strike me as perhaps unusual that she would also, without any publicly available writing or editing credits beyond her own Substack and some transcription credits on IMDB, which she could have added herself, suddenly be named an editor at Blue Amp Media, which has half a million followers on Substack. How she is suddenly EVERYWHERE. This is a coordinated campaign. She was MADE by someone. This is not organic.

But the situation becomes less unusual once you realize who’s behind Blue Amp Media, what it is, and what it exists to do.

Then, my friends, all of the pieces start to fit together.

Okay. So, Blue Amp Media bills itself as an independent media organization that seeks to “tell the truth as loud as the Republicans tell lies.” While many people might think this sounds pretty good, those people are not likely to be journalists. Journalists know that any news media organization needs to approach every single story with an open mind. Even if you think you know something, assume you actually do not. Make sure. Once you list your news media organization’s mission statement as “opposing Republican lies” you have outed yourself not as a journalism organization at all, but a political one. And politicized “journalism” isn’t journalism at all. It’s propaganda. Even if you agree with it. Even if you want to believe it.

I am 57, old enough to remember when the United States actually had real journalism. It died with the deregulation of the media in the mid-1990s, back when I was at Columbia University, getting my master’s degree in journalism. I was taught, back then, by the school’s dean, Stephen Isaacs, that journalists, true journalists, should not strive to be “objective,” because we are humans and we have our preferences and beliefs. Instead, a journalist, to be GOOD at JOURNALISM, ought to seek to be aware of their own prejudices and biases, and them COMPENSATE for them so that they do not get in the way of the truth. And that’s how I’ve managed my career, as a journalist and as a novelist. I have sought to always remain open to the possibility that my enemy might be right about something, and I might be wrong, and my heroes might also not be as great as they seem.

Blue Amp Media is owned by two men: Cliff Schecter, a democratic party public relations and marketing strategist, and David Shuster, a former MSNBC and Fox News anchor, among other TV news jobs. What Schecter and Shuster have in common, besides wanting to be the loudest and most obnoxious voices on the Internet in service to the Democratic party, is that they are both devoted, loyal Zionists — just like Lev Parnas.

Why does any of this matter? It matters because Schecter and Shuster are doing the opposite of what Dean Stephen Isaacs taught at Columbia Journalism School. They are not coming to journalism with an awareness of their own biases so that they will not let them get in the way of telling the truth. They are, instead, coming to the independent journalism world with the stated mission to push a pro-Israel, pro-genocide, pro-defense contractors, centrist and pro-zionist Democratic party agenda. It matters because when you untangle who Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were, and what THEIR goals were, they actually start to line up pretty cleanly with those of Shecter and Shuster along some important themes.

Let me be very clear. Zionism is not Judaism. Saying they’re the same is offensive, as offensive as saying White Christian Nationalism is the same as Christianity. Accusing people who oppose the genocide of Palestinians of being anti-Jewish is the most anti-Jewish thing anyone can do, because it tells you that in order to be pro-Jewish you must be a genocidal Zionist. False. Zionism is a white supremacist, racist, colonial and secular government operation. That the government is trying and often succeeding to conflate Zionism and Judaism is precisely the reason it is never a good fucking idea to have religious nation states. I am not anti-Jewish. I am anti-genocide. I don’t care who is on the receiving end of the genocide. Genocide is always wrong. Period.

Epstein was a Zionist. So was Ghislain Maxwell. Epstein was likely a Mossad operative, as was Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell — I have reported about all of this in this newsletter and I’m not going to re-argue it here. I have the receipts. Epstein and the Maxwells were all very interested in defense contracting and nuclear weapons technology secrets were their main reason for buying a rape ranch in New Mexico. Encourage powerful people to rape kids and others, collect blackmail material, let the powerful know you’ll keep it safe as long as they do what you want. And, at least in New Mexico, their closest friends and biggest protectors, whether Democrats like it or not, were all of the powerful people in the Democratic party, including Gov. Bill Richardson, now dead but named by Virginia Giuffre as one of her Epstein-assisted rapists.

This is not because the Democrats are more corrupt than the Republicans. Republicans are also trash, almost uniformly and across the board. And they’re protecting Epstein’s biggest buddy now. Democrats were Epstein’s pals in NM because in New Mexico, if you want power, you have to be a Democrat. The state is extremely blue. That’s who wins elections there, most of the time.

Okay. So. Many of the democrats in New Mexico who covered for Epstein and secretly took money from him are still very much in power. And they’re not alone. There are lots of national-level Democrats who are credibly implicated in the Epstein files, including Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. Epstein donated much more heavily to Democrats than he did to Republicans. Which is not to say lots of Republicans haven’t been involved with the child sex trafficking ring for Israel and the CIA that Epstein and Maxwell managed. Trump, especially, is on that list.

But Blue Amp Media and all of their associated editors and writers ONLY talk about the Republicans in the Epstein files. Those, they seek to destroy. Yet they ignore, or worse, mislead the public about, the centrist Democrats who did the same disgusting shit with the same disgusting guy.

Blue Amp Media, then, is not a media outlet any more than Fox News is. It is a partisan CENTRIST Democratic party public relations and marketing machine dressed up in the grungy flannels of “independent media,” and it exists to reaffirm your existing liberal views as a tool to manipulate you into voting blue no matter who(se kid they might have fucked.) And Ellie Leonard is one of their most reliable loyal mouthpieces. Whether she is doing this willingly and knowingly, or she’s doing this because she was insecure, wanted to be a respected writer, has covert narcissist tendencies (“Why am I only called to transcribe for great writers when I myself am a great writer and no one sees my talent etc etc etc”) and was flattered (read: manipulated) into loyalty by these master con artists is a matter of speculation.

What put me in their collective crosshairs was that my reporting was solid, and popular, and implicated powerful Centrist Democrats. They liked me when I was just the first two things. When I added the third thing, it was time to destroy me. And what better weapon for that than Ellie Leonard.

Ellie Leonard is beloved and relatable. She is very, very good at what she does. She has won thousands upon thousands of hearts and followers on Substack, and the corporate media can’t get enough of her. She is platformed by everyone. But here’s the thing. The platforming is not organic. It is strategic. And you, the reading and viewing public, are being manipulated to believe it’s what you want it to be — a soccer mom, a nonconfrontational smiling wife of a railroad guy, who just started using her transcription skills to investigate the Epstein Files because she had nothing better to do.

But a person like this does not have no digital footprint before 2022/2023. That started to be created THEN, precisely for the moment we are living in NOW. So that there would be a controlled opposition to the narrative about the Centrist Democrats in the Epstein Files. Party first. But not the whole party. Not the progressives, like me. Not the socialists. Not the Mamadanis. Just the centrists, the ones who happily take bribes from AIPAC and other organizations pushing the extremist, racist, right-wing, genocidal, colonizer Zionist agenda.

Ellie Leonard is a major part of that controlled opposition vis-a-vis the Epstein Files. She delivers the goods with receipts when the goods and receipts implicate Trump or other Republicans. But she mostly goes silent when those same files name Centrist Democrats — with, perhaps, the exception of Michael Wolff, but he is a self-proclaimed Democrat who was so Centrist he voted for Trump, so whatevs.

When powerful and currently beloved New Mexico Centrist Democrats got named as Epstein associates, by me, and those Centrist Democrats retaliated against me by stalking and attacking me in New Mexico, when I exposed the New Mexico Truth Commission as the sham protection racket that it is, when the state’s Democrats and their pals hit me with the kind of weapon former NM Attorney General and Epstein protector Gary King’s wife Yolanda Jones King fucking DESIGNS in Albuquerque, the same Ellie Leonard did not go quiet, and she did not, as a normal journalist might, decry what was being done to me; instead, she went for the jugular — MY jugular.

You have to ask yourself why the fuck a person who claims to be the person Ellie Leonard claims to be would do a thing like that, if her actual mission is the actual truth about the actual Epstein Files.

The answer, then, is that Ellie Leonard was by then a paid editor for Blue Amp Media, already being richly rewarded for covering the files the way Schecter wanted to files covered, which is to say covering the files in a way that would do maximum harm to Republicans and minimal harm to Centrist Democrats, with the sole aim of getting Centrist Democrats elected, even if it meant hiding inconvenient truths about some of them from the public. And the money backing this half-truth enterprise always leads back to Zionists.

Now why, you might ask, would Zionists be supporting both the Republicans and the Centrist Democrats? Because it works, for THEM. The AIPAC and other Zionist political action group money is being spent to ensure uniformity across both parties on Israeli policy. Zionists are single-issue focused, and that issue is Israeli supremacy and the right to commit genocide while the United States foots the bill. The intense focus on fake-news media in the Centrist Democrat space, underwritten by Israeli interest groups, is aimed primarily at one thing, and it isn’t defeating the Republicans. It’s defeating PROGRESSIVE Democratic Socialists, who are by far the most popular types of candidates in the United States across the board. And the reason they fear Progressive Democratic Socialists so much is that Progressive Democratic Socialists do NOT support the genocide of the Palestinian people and will not be, by that marker “friends to Israel.”

Now let me share a little bit more about Schecter with you. You know, the owner of Blue Amp Media. The ultimate Centrist Democrat Spin Doctor. He wrote campaign ads for Joe Biden. You know, Joe Biden, who also could have released the Epstein Files, but chose not to because he knew, as Schecter knows, that those files would bring down the blue as well as the red. And then where would we be? Why, we might be in the hands of the Progressive Democratic Socialists, then. The Progressive Democratic Socialists who hate genocide in Gaza. That would be very, very bad for Zionists, Israel, and all those global defense contractors who profit from endless war, and all those regular citizens with 410(k)s whose portfolios invest in defense contracting.

Schecter is a Zionist based in Ohio. You know who else is a Zionist based in Ohio? Les Wexner. Remember him? The guy who gave Epstein his money and his mansion, through the Mega Group, a group of wealthy Zionists whose only goal in life was to pool their money and use it on behalf of the Zionist agenda, at any cost, and by any means necessary. You might remember who else is based in Ohio, with Zionist ties, and got a massive state contract in New Mexico to develop Mesa del Sol, the nation’s first surveillance-oriented community: Forest City Covington, and they got that contract in part through the lobbying of a guy named Herb Denish, whose wife at the time was the Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico, serving under Bill Richardson. Meaning, all these dots connect and lead to the very people I was exposing for not just being in bed with Epstein, but for fraud in New Mexico.

Schecter recently lost his mind in a staff meeting, an insider told me, because he was in a rage that he’d been accused of being an Israeli spy. He keeps a running list of his enemies, the person told me. (I’m guessing I’m on it, again.) He also calls female employees to complain about his wife when he’s drunk. Boundaries are not really his thing. Especially not the boundary between political PR and journalism. And this is the man who now employs your beloved Ellie Leonard, who did not really exist in all the ways her self-reported biographies online say she existed, whose digital footprint suddenly appeared out of the ether in 2023, and is everywhere now. That Ellie. The one you love.

The United States no longer has a free press. Reporters Without Borders has been clear about that. There are voices like mine in the independent media sphere who are actually journalists and actually honest. But more and more this app, too, is being infiltrated by paid political operatives from the Republican and the Centrist parties. And what’s sick is that both of them are largely funded by the same forces, for the same reasons — and those forces and reasons are exactly the same ones that funded Jeffrey Fucking Epstein.

I’ll end by telling you Blue Amp Media isn’t the only Schecter enterprise based in Ohio. Blue Amp Action Political Action Committee is, too. They’ve taken in nearly a million dollars already this year.

And the person who’s in charge of it is … Jay. Jay Petterson.

You’re welcome.

Have a great day, everyone!

Oh, and before I forget, I wanted to tell you something else. There is another Ellie Leonard out there, with a digital footprint. She was a minor character in the Marc Cherry TV series DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES. She was played by Justine Bateman. Cherry is a Republican. So is Bateman, plus a zionist. The character of Ellie Leonard appears in Season 4, and lies about her identity so she can infiltrate a couple’s house. That’s her photo at the top of this piece.

Ciao.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a Tip

Tip Jar

Share

Subscribe now

On the morning of March 22, 2025, in a house on the 900 block of Beverley Drive in Alexandria, Virginia, someone called the police about a woman who would not wake. She was forty-three years old. She had spent most of two decades as a federal prosecutor, and for a little more than three of those years she had been one of the most powerful law-enforcement officials in the country. Her name was Jessica Aber, and by the time the officers arrived she was already dead.

Her death might have been nothing more than a terrible medical event. But this week, with the announcement of yet another former U.S. Attorney’s unexpected death, in San Diego, people paying attention to the growing number of dead prosecutors have begun asking whether some of these cases might be connected — and, if they are, whether there are others. When the careers of the dead prosecutors are placed alongside the people, institutions and interests they spent their professional lives investigating, a striking number of names begin to surface: financiers, political figures, intelligence-linked actors, organized-crime figures and others whose worlds sometimes overlap with the sprawling network surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The question is whether those overlaps mean anything. Do they point to a common network? Do they merely reflect how extraordinarily broad the reach of the Epstein world was? Or could they mean both? That is the question this series will investigate, beginning with Jessica Aber, and while we begin this series with United States Attorneys, it will expand to include others — business associates, friends, and even family members of some of the people whose names keep showing up as nodes in this web.

The subject does not forgive imprecision.

There is no known document called the Epstein Class kill list. No such document has been produced here, and there is no evidence establishing that Jessica Aber or many of the other people you’ll get to know in this series were murdered. The officials responsible for determining the circumstances of Aber’s death, for instance, found no evidence that another person caused it. The possibility that she died exactly as authorities concluded — from a sudden, natural medical event — remains entirely open.

The narrower proposition that you’ll find in this series is that certain deaths deserve closer examination rather than automatic closure, particularly when the people who died were young and had spent their professional lives investigating powerful criminal interests, including those with direct ties to the sitting President of the United States of America.

The term Epstein Class is used here as a working hypothesis: a loose constellation of global capital, intelligence-adjacent actors, financial institutions, political figures and criminal networks that appear, from the public record and from the continuing revelations surrounding Epstein and Maxwell, to have intersected around the trafficking of women and children, the collection of compromising material on powerful men, and the use of that material as leverage to achieve other aims. Whether that constellation represents a coherent network or merely a series of overlapping relationships remains an open question.

The starting population this week is sitting and former United States Attorneys who have died unexpectedly in the past several years. Most of the deaths are unremarkable. Many involved people of advanced age who died from ordinary illnesses.

But a small number stand out. Glaringly.

Some were comparatively young. Some died suddenly. And some had spent their careers in areas where human trafficking, financial crime, organized crime, foreign money and national security intersect.

One of them was Jessica Aber.

The prosecutor

Aber was a big deal, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — not the District of Columbia, a distinction that matters, but the district that includes Alexandria and much of Northern Virginia, close to the Pentagon, federal agencies, intelligence organizations and, notably, major defense contractors. Its prosecutors routinely handle some of the country’s most sensitive national-security cases.

President Biden nominated Aber in 2021, and the Senate confirmed her unanimously that October. She was the third woman to hold the office. She had come up inside the district, joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2009 and eventually becoming deputy chief of its Criminal Division. Her work included financial fraud, violent crime, international organized crime syndicates, and child-exploitation cases.

On January 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump returned to the presidency, Aber resigned.

Two months and two days later, she was dead.

The Virginia Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the manner of death natural and the cause sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, or SUDEP. SUDEP is a recognized complication of epilepsy and can kill without warning, sometimes during sleep. Aber’s family said she had lived with seizures for years. Police said they found nothing suggesting foul play.

That is the official account. It might very well be the true one.

But an official determination is the beginning of a factual inquiry, not a substitute for one. The relevant question is not who killed Jessica Aber. There is no evidence establishing that anyone did.

The question is how the determination about how she died was reached, what evidence supported it, who was responsible for making it, and what their sphere of associates looks like.

That question leads into the Commonwealth’s medical-examiner system, which operates within the Virginia Department of Health.

The office that decides

When Jessica Aber died, Virginia’s Department of Health was headed by State Health Commissioner Dr. Karen Shelton, an obstetrician-gynecologist and former health-care executive appointed by far-right Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in April 2023. The health commissioner does not conduct autopsies or personally determine individual causes of death. But the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the institution that does, operates within the department she led.

Dr. William T. Gormley was Virginia’s Chief Medical Examiner when his office classified Aber’s death as natural, and he still is. In 2016, Dr. Kevin Whaley, then an Assistant Chief Medical Examiner, publicly accused the office under Gormley’s leadership of corruption, leading to an internal investigation that decided the charges were unsubstantiated.

Whaley said Gormley’s office was selling human brains to the National Institutes of Health for $6,250 each, and not telling the families of the dead, and expressed dismay that he was forced to tell families that couldn’t afford the $40 autopsy report fee that they were out of luck, all the while knowing his office had sold their loved one’s brain to the NIH for six grand. Whaley also said Gormley pressured medical examiners to complete autopsy reports too quickly, with the edict that if mistakes were made, no biggie, the courts would sort it out.

Whaley also Gormley made it clear his examiners were supposed to be biased in favor of law enforcement. Whaley told Richmond’s CBS 6 he’d witnessed Gormley joking with law-enforcement personnel following a police-involved shooting, saying the victim would have died even if they’d only tased him.

“I know there are people that have been falsely convicted because of things that have happened in the office,” Whaley said, “and people that have walked that are guilty.”

Whaley was placed on paid pre-disciplinary leave after blowing the whistle on the office, and subsequently left.

In at least one other high-profile Virginia case, Gormley personally revisited a subordinate examiner’s conclusion and changed a child’s cause and manner of death from drowning to “undetermined.” That decision was subsequently central to litigation in a capital-murder prosecution.

The dramatic history of Gormley’s office does not prove that Jessica Aber was killed and his office covered it up. It establishes something more modest: the institution that closed the question of how she died has been the subject of serious, documented allegations of corruption.

And when you follow the chain of command up from Gormley, it goes a bit like this:

Shelton, appointed by Youngkin.

And Youngkin, a close pal to Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, who once made attendees of his own political rally swear allegiance to a flag flown during the January 6 insurrection.

What she carried

Aber’s office prosecuted human trafficking. In one 2023 case, federal prosecutors charged the owners of a Virginia cleaning company with exploiting workers, including a thirteen-year-old girl, through fraudulent documents, coercion and money laundering.

Her office prosecuted a billion-dollar cryptocurrency money-laundering operation run by Russian nationals.

In December 2023, Aber stood alongside senior Justice Department officials to announce the prosecution of four Russian military personnel accused of war crimes in Ukraine. The investigation involved the Eastern District of Virginia, the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the Justice Department’s war-crimes team.

Her office also handled child-exploitation cases investigated through federal task forces.

The words, placed side by side, are striking:

Human trafficking. Child exploitation. Financial crime. Money laundering. Russian nationals. National security. Defense Contractors. War crimes.

None of these categories is inherently connected to the others, but once you start to read the Epstein files and put the pieces of the vast puzzle together, you see the links. It’s likely Aber saw them, too.

That makes Aber’s professional history relevant to the larger investigation. But it still does not prove she is a murder victim.

Let’s Talk About Glenn Youngkin

Governor Glenn Youngkin came to Virginia politics after a quarter-century at The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private-equity firms. He joined Carlyle in 1995, rose through its investment and executive ranks, helped build its global energy-investment (read big oil) business, and served as co-chief executive before leaving in 2020 to run for governor.

Carlyle occupies a particularly noxious corner of the financial world that also happens to have been the same corner Jeffrey Epstein liked to hang out on, buying and selling children: the place where private equity meets defense contractors, dirty energy, buyable government and the enormous pools of capital that move between them. That world has repeatedly intersected with the people and institutions surrounding the Epstein story. Of special interest in the Aber death are the places where Youngkin and Carlyle intersected with Russian oligarchs in the oil sector, and Israeli leaders in the military defense industry, areas Aber investigated and in which Donald Trump was also connected.

One of Carlyle’s founders, David Rubenstein, appears in the Epstein files that have thus far been released by the Justice Department. Records show that Rubenstein and Epstein exchanged emails and met in 2012, years after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Their correspondence included discussion of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whose own relationship with Epstein has been extensively documented and scrutinized. Several credible sources have said Epstein himself likely worked for Israeli intelligence, that his collection of blackmail material on powerful people might have been in service, at least in part, to Israeli policy aims around the world.

Youngkin was CEO of Rubenstein’s company, and, as governor of Virginia, introduced legislation to ban government contracts for any company that boycotted Israel.

Carlyle Group’s cozy longstanding and ongoing relationship with Russian oil oligarchs is interesting, too, given that Aber investigated them and their links to both organized crime and Donald Trump.

No clear line can responsibly be drawn from those facts to Jessica Aber’s death without additional evidence that, if it exists, is likely impossible to find without meeting a similar fate. There is no public evidence that Youngkin, Carlyle, Rubenstein, Epstein, Maxwell, Israel, Russia or anyone associated with the recent Lukoil-Carlyle transaction had anything to do with Aber’s death.

The questions that remain

The death itself leaves questions that can be investigated.

What did the complete examination show? What toxicology was performed? What neurological evidence supported the SUDEP determination? Were medications present in Aber’s system? Were there injuries or other anomalies? Who performed each component of the examination? Were outside experts consulted?

What was Aber supervising when she left the U.S. Attorney’s Office on January 20? Which investigations remained active? Which were sealed or classified? What happened to the financial-crime, Russian, trafficking and child-exploitation investigations after her departure?

And who stood to lose something if those investigations continued?

Aber led one of the country's most important federal prosecutorial offices at the precise moment when it was handling cases involving intelligence agencies, defense contractors, classified information, Russian nationals, financial crime and other matters that intersected with the political and national-security worlds of the Trump administration. She resigned on the day Trump returned to the presidency. Did her abrupt resignation the day Trump as installed in his second term as president of the United States intend to send a message? And if so, what was it?

Finally, the questions we’ll end with today: Was Jessica Aber an isolated case, or is her name part of a larger pattern? And if there is a larger pattern, who’s benefiting the most from it?

Here at The Pugilist, we’ll keep asking questions about whether or not there is an Epstein Kill List, and we’ll keep connecting the dots to ask who might benefit most from one if it did exist. And because such questions likely don’t have answers anyone can easily find during our lifetimes, we’ll let you, dear readers, decide for yourself.

Leave a Tip

Share

Subscribe now

Dear Friends,

Hello from Spain! Welp. They say time flies when you’re having fun. And while moving overseas has been one giant pain in the ass and not really that fun at all, it’s still gone very quickly. It’s been one month and one day since I got here to Madrid, and I can hardly believe I am about to write the following words: I got an apartment in Spain as an American, and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be after reading nothing but warnings and horror stories in American immigrant (“expat”) groups online. You can’t rent an apartment without a national ID number, they told me — and yet, I did. You can’t find an apartment without knowing someone influential here — but I did. You can’t find a landlord willing to rent to you with pets — and yet… I did.

Here’s how.

(While I offer all news, investigations and analysis for free, I have opted to paywall my Diary in Exile section.)

Read more

Tip Jar

Share

Subscribe now

The curiously intimate relationship between bleach-blonde, spray-tanned Trump aide Natalie Harp and her rage-sharting human beanbag of a boss has eaten the news cycle whole this past week, delighting the usual centrist Democratic Party plants who love nothing on this earth more than to gently make fun of damaged people whose damage could lead to the end of the fucking world. Well — nothing more, perhaps, than a fresh blazer from Brooks Brothers on Connecticut Avenue and drinks at Cafe Milano in Georgetown.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that there is nothing organic about these Harp(y) stories bubbling up at precisely this moment — that the administration itself is the likeliest source, that they were almost certainly planted by Machiavellian MAGA spin doctors to bury, beneath a sexy little scandal, a multitude of genuine and gargantuan crises the White House would much rather you didn’t notice, on account of said crises posing an existential threat to, say, all life on earth. As is our custom here at The Pugilist, you won’t find us exhaustively rehashing WHAT happened — in this case, precisely not a goddamned thing. You’ll find us asking WHY.

And the WHY of Natalie Harp is not a political question. It is a psychological one. Why would an otherwise ambitious woman of thirty-five bind herself, body and heart and soul, to a self-shitting tyrant of eighty — a man old enough to be her grandfather, with years to spare? The answer, as is so often the case, has almost nothing to do with policy. And nothing illuminates the crucible in which Natalie Harp was forged quite like a good long look at her estranged older brother, Preston.

Preston Harp, unknown to most of the world until about ten days ago, has been all over American television since, describing his sister’s devotion to her diapered bossman with one clinical word: unhealthy. On CNN, he told Erin Burnett he loves his sister and hopes she wakes up. The corporate press took the clip, aired the estrangement, noted that Trump reportedly saved a seat for her in the trunk of an SUV so she could stay close to him, chuckled, and moved on. Wacky Washington. What a gal.

What almost none of them stopped to ask — what the Latin American press dug into while ours filed the human-interest B-roll — is that Preston is not nearly as different from his sister as the punchline requires. Because Preston, too, has bound himself with impassioned devotion to an authoritarian regime. In his case, that of Nicaragua’s husband-and-wife co-presidents, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.

If the name Daniel Ortega rings a bell, congratulations: you were alive in the 1970s, which means you’re as old as dirt. Like me. For everyone else, a quick primer. Ortega is a former guerrilla revolutionary, a leader of the Sandinistas who in 1979 overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. He is now, at eighty, the co-president of that same country alongside his wife, Murillo, seventy-five. Were the two of them ever to swap value systems, they’re both old enough now to stand an excellent chance of election to the United States Senate, where they could serve for the next forty years as long as their assistant insisted they were alive.

Preston, thirty-eight, has lived in Nicaragua since 2023, in the western town of Masaya. He calls himself a Sandinista. He poses in AI-generated photos wearing the uniform of the Nicaraguan National Police — the very force human rights groups hold responsible for the 2018 crackdown that left more than 360 people dead — and turns up at regime rallies co-presided over by Murillo. He signs off online with ¡Viva el Frente Sandinista!

Now, the tidy way to read this is that the siblings are opposites: she serves a grifting quasi-capitalist whose money flows ever upward to his own family; he cheers a government that at least talks the language of the poor. But economic ideology is not governance style, and it is governance style that gives the game away. Because when you set Trump beside Ortega-Murillo, the same silhouette emerges: two authoritarian regimes bent on strangling democracy in the crib. This July, at the official anniversary ceremony, Ortega announced that Nicaragua would simply stop holding elections — there will be no more elections here — claiming U.S.-backed forces would only use them to seize power. Trump has spent months dropping the same hint about America. Marco Rubio, Trump’s own Secretary of State, denounced the Nicaraguan announcement. The irony apparently escaped everyone in the building.

So here is the thing the wacky-commie-brother segment could never touch: both Harp children, as grown adults, are magnetized by bombastic dictatorial strongmen. Strip away the ideology and the psychology tells a single story. Natalie and Preston were quite likely raised by shitty, selfish, authoritarian parents. (As was I. Which is precisely why I recognize it.)

Seen through that lens, Natalie’s thirty-something devotion to Trump stops being a punchline and becomes something that makes me ache for the little girl she once was — the one who is still trying to save herself from the monsters who raised her by finding new monsters to reenact the old abuses upon her. In the simplest possible terms: Natalie loves Trump for the same reason Preston loves Ortega. These controlling, power-hungry, gaslighting assholes feel familiar. They feel like home.

And home, for the Harp children, was a homeschool in Southern California run by their white supremacist evangelical mother, Jill.

Their father, Robert, was the one who was often away — off deploying his stack of evangelical theology and ministry degrees to help corporations around the globe use Jesus as a lever for profit, which is to say, for doing roughly the opposite of everything the actual Jesus of the actual Bible ever actually taught. But the ideology was Jill’s ministry, and she was relentless about it. Preston has said so, on the record, on national television. Asked where his sister’s Trump infatuation was born, he didn’t reach for politics. He reached for their mother.

“My mom raised us with the idea that American exceptionalism was the correct way of looking at things,” he told CNN, “that the United States is the boss of the world, and that slavery was normal back then, so people weren’t bad because they had slaves.” He described a childhood steeped in a whitewashed history lifted straight from the fundamentalist Bob Jones University Press. Trump, he said, “is everything my mom taught us to respect.” His sister, he added, never broke out of “that delusion.”

Robert, by Preston’s account, was the parent who did break out — slowly, and late. The older he got, the more his social conscience drifted toward a gentler, more searching Christianity; toward, as Preston put it, trying to figure out how to actually live the way Jesus lived instead of collecting beliefs and judging strangers. And here is the detail that tells you everything about which parent Natalie was formed to please: Preston says he never once saw his sister look up to their father the way he did. As Robert grew more tender and more doubtful, Natalie’s bond with him frayed. She stayed fused to Jill. She stayed with the certainty of brutality. She stayed with the boss.

You cannot understand this family without understanding the system that manufactured its worldview, and that system has a name and an address. Robert taught at Biola University — I know, I know, my inner dyslexic is screaming Ebola — the far-right evangelical school in La Mirada, California, founded in 1908 as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles by oil magnate Lyman Stewart, a man who spent his petroleum fortune erecting twin thirteen-story towers over downtown L.A., each crowned with a red neon sign reading JESUS SAVES. It was Stewart who bankrolled The Fundamentals, the twelve-volume series published out of Biola’s orbit between 1910 and 1915 that gave American Christian fundamentalism its very name. This is not a fringe Bible college. This is the taproot. Its alumni include the sitting Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, class of ‘83.

It also produced the evangelist Danny Yamashiro — and I promise you cannot make this up — whose doctoral dissertation is titled American Presidents and Childhood Trauma: Intersecting Religious Education from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump. A Biola-forged preacher wrote an entire doctorate on presidents, childhood wounds, and religious upbringing, and rode it all the way to the name Trump. Somewhere in that title is the whole thesis of this essay, written by the institution’s own.

Because the Great Commission — the evangelical mandate to go forth and make disciples of all nations — is not, when you sit with it, a humble little errand. It is a theology of conquest, of expansion, of a single correct order of things to be imposed everywhere, by whatever means the moment allows. This is the water the Harp children swam in from birth: a home, and a faith, and a whole institutional universe organized around obedient attachment to authority, American supremacy, and the sanctified certainty that some people are simply, naturally, God-ordained better than others. Preston noticed the rot early and clawed his way out of the ideology. What he never clawed his way out of was the underlying shape of the thing — the deep, wordless comfort of a strongman who tells you exactly what to believe. He simply swapped one throne for another.

And nowhere does the cruelty of this inheritance land harder than in the matter of who gets to live.

Natalie’s entire origin myth is that Donald Trump saved her life. A bone cancer survivor, she has said the Right to Try law he signed let her reach an experimental treatment, and she has vowed, in writing, to dedicate her life to him in return. You are all that matters to me, she wrote. I want to bring you joy. She signed it with all my heart. She reportedly offered to go to prison under her own name to get around his gag order. She told a boyfriend, flatly, that Trump comes first, and if he couldn’t live with that he could leave.

Now stand all of that next to her brother. Preston left the United States in part because he could not afford health insurance here. After a serious motorcycle accident in Nicaragua, he got his physical therapy at a public hospital, for free, and watched no one get turned away at the door. That would be saving lives, he pointed out — a real public health system, funded by the money America pours into its military. One sibling was saved by a single law and spent the rest of her life in worship of the man who signed it. The other simply left the country that would have let him rot, and found care where he found it. The same childhood, two verdicts on what a life is worth.

Which brings us, finally and gently, to the death at the center of this family.

Robert Harp died by suicide in July 2020. And according to Preston, in the aftermath, Natalie and their mother wanted to call it natural causes — to say he had simply died in his sleep. I offer this the way Preston offered it, as his account and his alone. But if it is true, it is the entire thesis of this piece compressed into a single unbearable act. Because that is what an authoritarian household does, in the end. It manages the image. It sands the truth into something presentable. It cannot let a death be what it was any more than it could let a daughter be who she was. Present the acceptable version. Protect the story. Keep the image, toss the truth. Survive another day to rule the world.

That, in the end, is what I see when I watch Natalie Harp — the skinny, hungry, thousand-yard stare of a woman trying to meet a powerful man’s every need in her very body. Her presentation is textbook for a girl raised not only by an authoritarian parent, but inside an authoritarian faith, inside an authoritarian mythology of American supremacy — a girl who learned, early and completely, that she would only ever get her own needs met (to the extent she even knows what they are anymore) by disappearing into someone else’s bigger ones. Managing his moods as though they were her own. Adopting his enemies, his grudges, his likes. Being his mirror. Apologizing in advance for rages not yet arrived, to keep the peace, to keep the man, to keep breathing.

She is right at home with Donald Trump. He is familiar.

And Preston is not so different. He simply chose a different throne to kneel before, in a different hemisphere, in a language their mother never taught them — reaching, like his sister, for the one thing that home made feel like love: authoritarian leaders who want to do away with elections, because elections might mean they’d lose.

Tip Jar

Subscribe now

Share

Buy Me a Coffee (Tip)

Share

Subscribe now

Every day here on Substack or on one of my (other?) social media platforms, a well-meaning (or maybe not-so-well-meaning) stranger (enemy?) writes to explain my fatal error. The thing, they insist, that either makes me stupid or a liar: If I fled the United States for my safety, they ask, why would I say where I landed?

They think this is an ah-ha moment. It’s not. The question itself betrays that predictable failure of imagination you find in people from the United States who, steeped in American Exceptionalism and having Never Been Anywhere the Fuck Else, assume the whole world is either just like the United States or much, much worse than the United States, and never, ever better than the United States in any meaningful or quantifiable way. They are fools. But you know what? I will explain how it is possible to be run out of your country by what were most likely attacks from your own state government, and be in less danger when you get somewhere else. Somewhere better.

Let’s start with press freedom, since that’s my trade. Reporters Without Borders ranks 180 countries every year by how free or unfree their news media are, and in 2026 the United States sits at 64th, down seven places in a single year because of Donald Trump’s encroaching totalitarianism, and down 47 positions since the index began in 2002, when it ranked 17th. Spain, by contrast, ranks 29th, and on the specific indicator that measures the physical safety of journalists, Spain ranks first in the entire world.

Once more, and louder, for the people napping in the back of the room: I left one of the most increasingly dangerous countries on earth for independent journalists (the United States of America) for the world’s safest country for journalists. For the danger of being hurt while doing my job, the country I left is falling off a cliff and the country I chose is the safest place on earth. I hope that helps clear things up a little.

Now let’s talk about how a government or private militia attacker or stalker might find me in the United States, versus how they might in Spain.

Consider how someone would actually find me — street and door — and you arrive at the quiet noxious engine of American life: the data broker. In the United States your precise location is a corporate commodity. Phone apps harvest it, brokers buy and repackage it, and real-time location data is collected and sold on the open market without your knowledge or consent, leaving you exposed to surveillance, scams, and threats from anyone willing to pay. The lone federal attempt to rein this in — a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that would have forced brokers to obtain consent before selling sensitive data — was withdrawn in May 2025, leaving the trade with almost no oversight at the national level.

Spain runs on the opposite premise. I need you guys to really understand this. Under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, my location is legally protected personal data that cannot be collected, sold, or processed without a lawful basis, backed by fines steep enough to frighten Silicon Valley and by a standing right to have my data erased. Every time I log onto a US website here, I get an alert to opt out of data collection, and I opt out. That shit does not happen in the United States. Everyone in the United States is constantly having their privacy violated by private companies run by the Nerd Reich. The American people-search and location-brokerage industry that would hand a stalker my address for pocket change cannot operate here the way it does there. Could a determined actor in military intelligence still find me? Given enough time and money, perhaps. The difference is that here they would have to break the law to do it, rather than simply pay the going rate. It’s not that they can’t find me; it’s that it’s a lot fucking harder to do it now.

And there’s more.

Let’s talk about the guns. The firearm homicide rate in the United States is 4.4 per 100,000 people; in Spain it is 0.1 — forty-four times lower. The USA logged roughly 16,940 homicides in 2024, and firearms are the leading cause of death for American children, with more than 43,000 firearm deaths in a single recent year. Here in Spain yesterday, I walked through the “worst” neighborhood in the city — Entrevias — with my dog, to get him from our Airbnb in Vallecas to the new apartment in Centro. Not once did I worry I’d get hurt. All I found there was great Cuban food. Meanwhile, back in the rural USA I left, my fucking neighbor shot my dog when he escaped from our yard, to teach him a lesson, and the cops did nothing about it. Same dog. Better country.

Much of the world is simply safer than the United States, because governments in countries like Spain regulate things that put people like outspoken independent journalists in danger. Americans have been brainwashed to believe such regulations infringe upon freedom — and in a way it’s true. The lack of privacy regulations in the United States post 9-11 has taken away corporations’ and governments’ freedom to surveil us all without warrants. That shit doesn’t happen in Spain. So even if I tell the world I’m in Spain, it’s still a shit-ton harder for anyone who wanted to, say, purchase surveillance data from one of the many companies that are allowed to sell our data to anyone with the cash. You simply can’t fucking do that here.

You know what else you can’t do here? Wage war against a journalist through false allegations in the courts to terrorize and silence them, aka lawfare, which is happening more and more in the United States and in fact happened to me just before I left. The sitting president has turned the courthouse into a weapon of censorship and forced propaganda compliance aimed at the press. Disney’s ABC paid him $15 million to settle a defamation suit; Paramount’s CBS paid $16 million in July 2025. In December 2025 he filed a $10 billion suit against the BBC, one entry in a long list that includes The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and over his lifetime he has been party to more than 4,000 lawsuits. Legal scholars call these cases largely meritless, because winning was never the point — the point is to use litigation as a weapon to silence critics. Meanwhile the FCC has opened investigations into news organizations whose corporate parents need federal approval for mergers. You bleed the watchdog until it learns to look away.

Contrast that with where I am. The European Union passed an Anti-SLAPP Directive — “Daphne’s law,” named for the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was facing 48 lawsuits designed to silence her when she was assassinated. It lets courts throw out abusive suits early and shift the costs onto the powerful plaintiff who filed them, and it runs alongside the European Media Freedom Act and a rapid-response mechanism for journalists under threat. Here the machinery is being built to protect reporters. In the USA, the system is build for intimidation that is operated personally from the Oval Office in Washington DC and the Round House in New Mexico.

I’ll have more to say about exactly what New Mexico’s Epstein cabal did to my family through the courts right before I left, when the moment is right and the record allows. For now it’s enough to tell you that I know precisely what lawfare feels like when it’s aimed at you, because I felt it on my way out the door. That is not the reason I left. But it is sure as hell the confirmation that I was right to get the fuck out.

Then there are the men with badges. The United States now detains and deports journalists outright, to punish them for telling truths powerful people don’t want told — RSF cited the recent detention and deportation of Salvadoran reporter Mario Guevara. A Homeland Security secretary publicly attacked CBS over an edited interview, after which the network changed how it airs interviews altogether. Spain has no ICE, no DHS, no federal apparatus that treats a press pass as probable cause. Meaning: I am safer here.

The state I left is one of the most dangerous corners of the United States for journalists and anyone else who runs afoul of the powerful political mafia there. New Mexico carries the second-highest violent crime rate in the United States — nearly double the national average — and the highest property crime rate in the nation. Its murder rate, 11.5 per 100,000, runs more than twice the American norm. Almost one in five New Mexico residents lives in poverty, against a national rate closer to one in nine. Albuquerque, home to roughly a quarter of the state’s people, has long absorbed a far larger share of its violent crime. Its police department spent years under a federal consent decree after the Justice Department found a pattern of officers using excessive force. Layer on the land deals and buried favors I’ve spent this newsletter documenting — the Zorro Ranch orbit and the people who kept its secrets — and the portrait is complete: violent, poor, brutally policed, quietly corrupt.

New Mexico is deadly for whistleblowers. Period. The NM political corruption apparatus could ruin any man or woman in the state with one phone call from the governor. But while she might be a big dog in Madrid, New Mexico, population 247 souls, New Mexico’s governor ain’t dog shit in Madrid, Spain, metro population 6.9 million — or more than triple the entire population of New Mexico, period. Nobody here owes the NM governor a favor or cares about who she knows at Highlands University. Her provincial power dies at the border of her failing state, and that kind of power doesn’t like to go anywhere with much bigger fish who will know the minnow the second they see it.

So to summarize in answer to this annoyingly frequent question — “How can we believe you left because you were attacked if you are telling people where you are now?” — safety does not come from me “hiding.”

It comes from me living somewhere with a fucking safety net instead of authoritarianism and oligarchy.

It’s a place where the law is on your side, journalists are protected by the government instead of persecuted by it, guns are strictly regulated, and the woman or man in charge can’t sue a journalist into silence and would instead go straight to prison for even trying.

I didn’t leave the United States to disappear. I left for Spain so I could keep showing up, fearlessly.

Buy Me a Coffee (Tip)

Share

Subscribe now

sSources

1. Reporters Without Borders, 2026 World Press Freedom Index (rsf.org) — U.S. and Spain rankings; journalist-safety sub-indicator; notes on Spain’s own pressures

2. UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) — firearm homicide rates by country.

3. FBI, Uniform Crime Reporting / Crime Data Explorer — 2024 U.S. homicide count.

4. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions — annual U.S. firearm deaths and firearms as the leading cause of death among American children.

5. News reporting (Associated Press, Reuters) — ABC–Disney ($15M) and CBS–Paramount ($16M) defamation settlements.

6. BBC News; The New York Times — Trump’s $10B suit against the BBC, related media litigation, and lifetime lawsuit tally.

7. News reporting — FCC inquiries into broadcasters whose parent companies have pending mergers.

8. European Union Anti-SLAPP Directive (”Daphne’s Law”); Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation — the 48 suits she faced.

9. European Commission — European Media Freedom Act and the Media Freedom Rapid Response mechanism.

10. Reporters Without Borders — detention and deportation of journalist Mario Guevara.

11. News reporting — the Department of Homeland Security secretary’s public criticism of CBS.

12. USAFacts (usafacts.org) — New Mexico violent- and property-crime rankings, 2024.

13. SafeHome.org analysis of FBI data — New Mexico murder rate.

14. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey — New Mexico and national poverty rates.

15. Compiled FBI data (”Crime in New Mexico”) — Albuquerque’s share of statewide violent crime (older figures).

16. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division (2014 findings) — Albuquerque Police Department consent decree.

Today, I ate a tortilla. No, silly. Not that kind of tortilla. A tortilla Española. Since moving to Spain from the United States of America a month ago, I’ve been assured by no shortage of people that this, the Spanish tortilla, a thick omelette made with stacks of thinly-sliced potatoes cooked in olive oil and held together with whisked eggs, is a Spanish “classic.” I’ve also been assured that my new favorite breakfast meal, pan con tomate — toasted rustic, crusty bread with pureed tomato, olive oil and salt (and sometimes fresh garlic) — is also a class dish of Spain.

I took a cab today with a Peruvian driver. We talked a bit as he steered us through Madrid, about what Spain has been like for us both, as immigrants from the Americas and, more specifically, from parts of the Americas that were colonized first by Spain. “They really seem to think they invented the potato here,” I said, watching his eyes in the rearview mirror. He cut me a quick, amused look, and raised one eyebrow.

“They don’t teach their children the truth about what they did in America,” he said, meaning all of the Americas. “They’re still teaching their kids that they’re superior to us.”

My cab driver is from the Andes, where the potato originated. His ancestors cultivated it, just as they cultivated tomatoes, for thousands of years before they ended up the star ingredients of dishes Spaniards insist are their classics. The potato grew for millennia in the cold highlands of what’s now Peru, near what would become Potosí. The tomato came to the mesoamerica Aztecs from the Andes, too, as trade, long before Spain arrived. The Aztecs cultivated the savory red fruit. The potato and the tomato crossed the Atlantic in the hold of a ship, riding the same trade route as the silver Spain also insisted was its own. And today, incredibly, Spain is still acting like all three just came to them all on their own, or only through Spanish efforts —Spain, eating its own arrival myth and tasting nothing but itself.

The words on the menus still carry the receipts, though most Spaniards might not realize it. Tomate comes from the Aztec Nahuatl word tomatl. Patata is a linguistic collision — Quechua papa fused with Taíno batata — two indigenous American tongues braided into a single Castilian noun. Pimentón, the paprika that colors chorizo and defines half of what registers to the world as Spanish flavor, is ground from American peppers. And the chocolate everyone drinks with their churros? The word is from the Nahuatl xocolatl, which means “bitter water.” That most popular treat came to Spain up the same gangway. The New World rewrote the Spanish plate so thoroughly that the plate now reads as eternally Iberian to people here, and the etymology sits there like a birth certificate no one bothers to open.

I am a strange person to be doing this tasting, and I know it. My mother’s line of Spaniards goes back more than thirteen generations in New Mexico. One line reaches to the Oñate expedition of 1598 — the conquest arriving at my own ancestral doorstep with the sword and the notarized land grant. Three of our direct ancestors were on that expedition. Another line is indigenous New Mexican, the people that expedition came to convert, rape, steal from, enslave and kill. I am the Columbian Exchange with a body, sitting in the metropole, eating the tuber and the fruit that traveled the identical route my two bloodlines did, in opposite moral directions. The tortilla is a confession that no one in this bar reads as one.

But now that Madrid is home to more than 1 million immigrants from the Americas, it’s going to start getting harder for this city to continue to delude itself about who, exactly, paid for all their beautiful palaces and gardens around here, and who cultivated, through advanced science and farming techniques, “their” proudest national dishes.

Naturalization is a kind of amnesia. A food becomes “timelessly Iberian” precisely by forgetting how it arrived — the origin worn smooth by daily use until the word stops meaning anything but lunch. And the forgetting is not random. It always follows the money.

Consider Potosí. The silver mountain of the Andes financed the Spanish empire for two centuries, its ore hauled out on the backs of Indigenous mita enslaved laborers and, when too many of them had been killed, Spain enslaved millions of Africans and brought them to the Americas. Few U.S. Americans realize this, but Spain pioneered the African slave trade. England copied them. Most of the African slave trade took place south of what’s now the United States.

The potato grew in the same cold air where millions of indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans died at the hands of Spain, in the same highlands, feeding the same people whose lungs the mines consumed. The silver got shipped to fund the crown. The potato got shipped to feed the poor of Europe, where it eventually became the humblest, most domestic food imaginable — the thing a grandmother fries on a Sunday. One traveled as plunder and is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as glory. The other traveled as a botanical curiosity and is remembered as heritage. Both came from the same mountain, carried by the same ships, wrung from the same conquered ground. Only one of them still shows up on the national plate every single day, and it is the one that has been most completely stripped of where it came from.

But empire does this. Empire honors the crop and erases the labor. It keeps the flavor and passive-voices the provenance into “the Age of Discovery,” “the encounter with the New World” — language as bloodless and capricious as wind.

In 2019, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, sent a letter to King Felipe VI and to Pope Francis asking Spain to apologize for the abuses of the conquest. Spain rejected it with, in its own phrasing, all firmness, and offered the line that has become the template for European colonial deflection everywhere: deeds of five hundred years ago cannot be judged by the criteria of today. Madrid regretted, mostly, that the letter had been made public.

The refusal hardened into ritual. When Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October 2024, she left Spain’s King Felipe off the guest list for her inauguration, citing his silence on that letter. Spain called the exclusion unacceptable and stayed away at every level. A sitting monarch, uninvited to a former colony’s swearing-in, over a sorry he would not say. This was two years ago, folks.

And then, slowly, the choreography of the almost-apology began. In October 2025, at the opening of an exhibition of Indigenous Mexican art in Madrid, Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, spoke of pain and injustice toward Indigenous peoples, and said it was only fair to recognize it and to regret it. Around the same exhibition, the King himself, studying the art, allowed that there had been much abuse during the conquest, and that some of it, measured by present values, could not make Spaniards proud. Sheinbaum received these as gestures — reconciliation of a kind — while noting, precisely, that it was not everything one would have wanted.

Regret. Recognition. Pain acknowledged. Every emotion in the neighborhood of an apology, orbiting the thing itself, never landing on it. The crown will grant that abuse occurred, in the abstract, in the passive, as something that happened rather than something anyone did. What the crown will not say is the sentence with a subject and a verb: we did this, and we are sorry. And I will grant the complication honestly, because the record deserves it — this is not a settled question even in Mexico, where surveys have found more citizens opposed to demanding a Spanish apology than in favor of it, and where historians point to formal reconciliations in 1836 and 1910 as apologies already made. The demand is contested. The refusal is not. Spain has decided, across governments of every stripe, that the word costs more than it is willing to pay.

The one honest witness

Here is the strange grace of it. The food is the only participant in this whole arrangement that has not lied. Food bears witness, one of the many subversive ways, often concocted in the kitchen under the hands of women, that the conquered outlast their conquerers.

The potato still answers to a Quechua-Taíno name. The tomato still carries its Nahuatl in the first syllable. The pepper in the pimentón still crossed an ocean it did not ask to cross. These crops make no argument and offer no defense of empire, and precisely because they are mute they cannot deflect. They are the receipt the empire kept by accident, folded into the most intimate act a culture performs, which is to feed itself and call the food its own.

Subscribe now

Share

Tip Jar!

Dear Friends,

I’ve been putting this off long enough. It’s a thing I do. When I really want something to succeed, I freeze. And I want this little Diary of My Exile in Madrid to succeed. In the freezing, I overthink it. As someone who is constantly, even at this later stage of my life, still healing from a lifetime of narcissistic abuse, I start to second-guess myself. Third guess. Fourth. I look around for some sort of confirmation that I am allowed to want what I want and do what I do. I fear making a mistake. I catastrophize and imagine that the mistake will rip away everything I have ever held dear.

So today, I’m just going to do it. Dive right in. Head first. Hope the water is deep enough.

Write the damn diary.

I keep thinking I should go back to three months ago, so that this story makes sense. Tell you about how they broke into my house and moved things around so I’d know they’d been there. Tell you about how they parked unmarked white vans in my driveway at night, in rural New Mexico, where there is no shortage of somewhere else to park. Tell you how they followed me around in their dark-windowed SUVs, how they were obvious about it because terrorizing me was the point. How they orchestrated coordinated online smear campaigns. They? The Epstein protectors. The people still in power in New Mexico, who stand to lose a lot if the world should ever believe they did what they did and do what they do.

How when all of that failed to shut me up, they had a guy named Brandon Padilla call my friends to tell them to shut me up. The “or else” was inferred. How when that did not work, either, they used a microwave directed energy weapon hidden in a moving truck they parked outside of my house. How my ears bled. How it gave me a brain injury. How it burned and ached for months. How my brain got swollen. How my white blood cell count dropped consistent with exposure to radiation. How I ran from my house as soon as I understood what they were doing. How they followed me as I went house to house all over New Mexico to try to evade them as I made all the arrangements to actually leave the state and the country. Putting things in storage. Arranging my father’s affairs so he could come, too. Paperwork. All the paperwork. For four people and three pets.

How one of the pets was too sick and old to get approved to leave the country and I had to have her put down, something the vet had long ago suggested but because she was my best friend I had not been able to make myself do it. How I watched her go, and did not cry, and could not understand until just this past week, when I began crying and could not stop for several days, that it was my own nervous system protecting me then, the numbness.

How that entire epoch, three months ago, running from monsters, killing my best friend, was the worst trauma I’ve ever dealt with in a lifetime of trauma. How the trauma got worse when the monsters decided to use the court system to stop me from leaving, four days before my flight. How they used to courts to destroy my family and steal my father’s meager estate. How they used the courts to kidnap my father. How the judge who did this ended up, when I finally looked, also being in the Epstein files, also a friend to Jeffrey Epstein, also connected, closely, to the people I had written about.

How all of this meant that my beloved New Mexico, where my family has lived for 13 generations, was no longer safe for me. How I had no choice but to leave with only one suitcase, a backpack, my son, my living dog (I had two) and my cat. How the pets were the hardest part. Coordinating the examinations and the official certifications of health from the government, at just the right moment. How I had to leave my father behind.

How I wondered if I was now on some bogus terrorism watch list because I am a Latina, a progressive, a socialist, the daughter of a Marxist, the daughter of an immigrant father, a person with family still in Cuba. How wondering about this made me look for ways to leave the USA that would not involve TSA or border patrol. How I wondered if my own car were being tracked, and so I gave it back to the dealership I’d financed it from, even though it would ruin my credit to do this. How I rented another car, and drove from New Mexico to San Diego and turned the rental car in.

How we walked across the border at the Cross Border Express bridge, which leads from the US only to the Tijuana airport, because that was one of two routes I could find where I would not have to speak to potentially racist, possibly MAGA American agents. How I stopped at the plaque halfway down that walkway, the one that tells you you’re in Mexico now, and I cried for just a moment. More like shivered. Like someone standing in the snow. My whole nervous system just a strummed cord going from a minor key to a major one. How that one step, then the second step, brought me into a country where ICE could no longer shoot me and pretend I deserved it.

How hard it was to fly the dog. Huge dog. So big he could only go on certain airlines and only to certain cities. How we went, my son, my cat and I, without the dog, how we left the dog with a company in LA and trusted them to transport him. How this all cost more than a year of rent.

How I left my saxophone behind. And my son’s baby photos. Everything in a storage unit. How I knew I’d never likely come back to the nation where I was born, the USA. How I’d have to trust a moving company to send me the most important memories I had.

How we flew to Mexico City for a month, because it had been part of a long-ago plan that involved my father. How I fell in love with Mexico City and was heartbroken because my son and mom would not be able to get residency in Mexico. How I stayed for a month because I wanted to explore the land of my own and my son’s partial ancestry, Mexico, with my son. How I took a photo of him in front of the giant Aztec sun stone at the Museum of Anthropology and I have never been more proud. How I had goosebumps and rage at that museum, for all that colonization has done and continues to do, for all the injustices. How I wish I could have stayed in Mexico City. How Mexico City is my heart. How I had to leave Mexico City, too.

Which brings us to now.

Read more

Tip Jar!

Share

Subscribe now

The camera kept recording after Valeria Márquez slid out of frame.

She was twenty-three, broadcasting to TikTok from the beauty salon she owned in Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico — the ordinary afternoon patter that had built her audience, product on the counter, a gift arriving at her chair. She reached for it. A man out of frame raised a pistol. The business she had built on being watched became the setting for her killing, streamed live in May 2025 to an audience that had come for lip gloss and were subjected to the murder of a person they’d come to think of as a friend. Mexican prosecutors would later describe a contract hit and link a suspect in her death to the assassination, months afterward, of a sitting mayor.

Two days later and a border away, in Cúcuta, Colombia, a man posing as a delivery driver carried a gift to the door of María José Estupiñán — “La Mona,” twenty-two, a lifestyle creator with a modest and growing following. He shot her on her own porch. Investigators opened the case as a possible femicide, weighing jealousy, a stalker, a documented history of abuse.

Valeria and Maria were the start of a list of murdered women influencers that grew all year, and if you spend any time online you have watched it grow: the beautiful, camera-native, self-made young beauties whose deaths arrive in your feed already edited for maximum grief, with a subtext of well, they were kind of asking for it, though.

The instinct, cultivated by gossip magazines and publications like People magazine, is to read the list as a single story — it has become dangerous to be a beautiful woman who wants a large and public following — and to stop there. The instinct is wrong, thought — or rather it is only the manifestedly visible tip of something colder, more structural, and less gendered.

The killings are real. But there are many more than you’re hearing about. Which influencer’s murder is allowed onto the pages of People or onto your social media feed is a story, too, because that information is being curated to serve a sexist and racist narrative: Beautiful girls look like this, and you should desire them, but they should not desire to be desired, and if they do, and if it makes them too powerful, look what happens.

The list, and what it actually contains

Sort the past year plus’ dead online creators by how they died, and the single explanation actually fractures into four distinct categories of dead influencers.

The first and bloodiest category has almost nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with a country’s open wound. In Culiacán this August, Cesar Gastelum — a man, six hundred thousand followers — was gunned down mid-livestream while broadcasting with friends, another casualty of the faction war tearing the Sinaloa Cartel apart from inside. He was one of roughly a dozen digital creators killed in that Mexican state in recent years.

The monitoring group ACLED has recorded targeted attacks on content creators across at least sixteen Mexican states since 2018; in Sinaloa alone it counts twenty attacks and fourteen deaths since the current cartel fracture opened in 2024. Analysts have a word for what is happening: the cartelization of the internet, in which a large following becomes a currency criminal factions covet, exploit, and punish. A livestream leaks your location, your allegiances, the logo on your cap.

The Venezuelan TikToker Jesús Sarmiento was killed on camera after denouncing the Tren de Aragua gang. This is a war story that happens to be filmed vertically.

The second category is the one that actually carries the weight of gender, and it is the one worth slowing down for. Sana Yousaf was seventeen, a Pakistani TikToker who used her platform to promote Chitrali culture and girls’ education. In June 2025 a man forced his way into her Islamabad home and shot her after she rejected his advances.

In Brazil, the book influencer Tais Bruna de Castro was stabbed to death for the same refusal.

These are the killings the parasocial economy manufactures directly: a platform sells intimacy at scale, a stranger mistakes access for entitlement, and a woman dies for saying no to a man who believed her visibility was a promise made to him. A Harvard-trained clinical psychologist, interviewed about the trend, put the mechanism plainly — a large audience delivers admiration and, folded invisibly inside it, fixation, resentment, and the conviction of being owed.

The third category is the oldest one on earth, wearing a new costume. When the Oklahoma creator Sara Gilson was allegedly killed by her estranged husband this summer, her following was almost incidental to her death. She was a woman murdered by a man she had once loved — the most common way women die, whether or not a phone is filming.

The fourth is money made visible. Ariela Mejia-Polanco, a nightlife influencer, was shot in her Mercedes on a Westchester parkway in the summer of 2025, yards from her home. Prosecutors believe a street crew targeted her for a carjacking, possibly cued by the flash of her Instagram. The district attorney called her an innocent woman unknown to her killers, who crossed their path by chance. Her feed was a shop window, and someone went shopping.

Notice what the sorting reveals. The men on the list — Gastelum, Sarmiento, the Las Vegas streamer Rodney Finley and his wife Tanisha, gunned down by a rival he had feuded with; the New Jersey creator Chrystofer Whyte, tracked from his own livestream and shot — die alongside the women, but their stories are downplayed, because they don’t further the subtextual misogynist narrative the mainstream media loves.

The story is not simply pretty women who seek too much attention get what’s coming to them. If it were, there would not also be men here in these numbers. But there are. And they’re here because the thing killing all of these influencers is not their only their gender and not just their beauty.

It is their exposure, and the complete lack of a support system to protect self-made media stars.

The cautionary tale has a type

A brilliant professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism named this type of reflex a generation ago. In Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (1992), Helen Benedict showed that when a woman is harmed, the newsroom reaches instinctively for one of two scripts: the virgin, pure and blameless and therefore grievable, or the vamp, provocative and visible and therefore, in the story’s silent logic, complicit in her own ruin. Benedict was writing about rape coverage, but she was really describing an impulse older than any single crime — the urge to turn any woman’s suffering into a lesson for other women about the price of stepping out of line. She documented two habits alongside it that map cleanly onto the influencer beat: the press’s measurable preference for lighter-skinned victims, and a language bias that grants male perpetrators more generous words than it ever spares for women.

Update the technology and the reflex is intact. The beautiful influencer is the vamp rewritten for the algorithm — she monetized her own visibility, courted the lens, was adored and confident and paid for it, and her death now arrives wrapped in an unspoken look at the life she was living. Gwen Ifill gave the selection half of this its bluntest name: missing-white-woman syndrome, the newsroom’s bottomless hunger for the imperiled young, pretty, and pale, and its shrug at everyone else who bleeds.

Look closely at whose deaths did travel this year, though, and the filter resolves into something more exact than a color line. Valeria Márquez, María José Estupiñán, Sana Yousaf — Mexican, Colombian, Pakistani — were mourned across the international press, which appears to complicate the whiteness point until you notice what they share: fair skin, blonded hair, youth, conventional beauty, and a nearness to a Eurocentric standard that the algorithm and the wire desk reward in the same reflex. The aperture has widened since Ifill named the syndrome in 2004. It now admits the light-skinned, camera-ready woman of nearly any ethnicity — but it still, with brutal consistency, shuts on Black women.

The research leaves little room to argue: matched for every “ideal victim” trait, white women have drawn several times the coverage of women of color, and Black and Indigenous women are routinely written not as damsels to be rescued but as figures coded less innocent, criminalized in the telling before they are ever grieved. The virgin and the vamp are at least women the story can picture mourning. Black women are too often filed into a third place the newsroom keeps for the ones it declines to see as victims at all. They are entirely erased.

The cruelest turn is the one the Kardashian era perfected. The beauty this economy rewards — the full lips, the curves, the bronzed skin, the braids and laid edges — was authored by Black women and now pays out most richly on bodies that are not Black, and this shows in the editorial choices about which influencer murders get covered and which do not. Critics have called the practice blackfishing since the writer Wanna Thompson’s 2018 thread catalogued non-Black influencers costuming themselves as Black women; scholars have since traced how Black aesthetics get mined for profit on Instagram; and the Kardashian-Jenner empire has become the standing example, accused across a decade of criticism of monetizing phenotypically Black features while never paying the tax Black women pay for those same features. The result is a double erasure. The economy takes the look and discards its authors — barring them from the beauty capital, and then, when women die, from the mourning. The vamp who sells is a borrowed silhouette, and the women she was borrowed from rarely make even the cautionary tale.

This essay would earn the same charge if it stopped here, because every name in it so far is a non-Black woman. So let me name the ones the grief cycle skipped.

In August 2026, Brianna Johnson — the twenty-one-year-old creator known as DreamDoll Bri, whose music had become a TikTok sound — was shot and killed in Miramar, Florida as she left a party; police reported no arrest, and no international mourning followed.

Months before, Girlalala, a twenty-one-year-old Black trans creator, was shot dead in nearby Lauderdale Lakes, her boyfriend charged. Their followings rivaled some of the women the world wept over. Their deaths stayed local, or stayed inside Black and queer media, or stayed nowhere at all. Put them back in the frame and the shape completes itself: the danger crosses every line, and the mourning halts at a color one.

So the uncovered men are the tell. Their absence from the grief cycle is the evidence. Put Cesar Gastelum and Jesús Sarmiento and Chrystofer Whyte back into the frame beside Valeria and María José and Sana, and the sexist reading buckles under its own selection bias: the danger was never a trait of beautiful women. It was a trait of exposure, spread across every gender, and the coverage only made it look female because a dead pretty woman sells the cautionary tale and a dead man does not.

There is a male edition of the vamp, and it goes by he had it coming. When Perez Hilton — the gossip blogger who spent the 2000s siccing a mob on young female stars, and an openly gay man who has been a public target most of his career — suffered a very public crisis this summer, much of the reaction ran on exactly that script: the glee, the sense of a ledger squaring, the certainty that he had earned it. Hold him there for a moment. His case is the hinge, and I will come back to it.

The submerged mass

Here is the number that keeps the whole spectacle honest, and it is a number almost no one will click on, because it, too, fails to serve the noxious media subliminal narrative of women who are too attractive, self-assured and rewarded for it will get what’s coming to them. Women and girls are always being abused and murdered. Worldwide. By men. On purpose. And the problem is men.

In 2024, according to UN Women and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, roughly 83,000 women and girls were killed intentionally worldwide. About 50,000 of them — sixty percent — died at the hands of an intimate partner or a family member. That is 137 women a day. One every ten minutes. In the Americas, nearly seven in ten women killed inside the home were killed by a partner. Three in four femicide victims had been stalked by the man who eventually killed them.

Those women did not trend on TikTok. They had no ring light, no verified badge, no follower count to lend their deaths a headline. They were killed in kitchens and bedrooms and parked cars, and the overwhelming majority of them vanished from public attention the same week, if they ever entered it at all. The murdered influencer is not proof that fame invites death. She is proof of the opposite asymmetry: that a death becomes visible in rough proportion to how photogenic and public the victim already was. The feed did not make these women more likely to die. It made a handful of them impossible to ignore, while the tens of thousands behind them stayed exactly as invisible as they have always been. So the influencer deaths get spun as the lie “what the women deserved,” rather than as the truth: “this is happening to women all the time, whether on camera or off.”

Reach without a rod

For most of the last century, speaking to a mass audience required an institution. You reached people through a newspaper, a network, a record label, a film studio — and the institution came bundled with protection you never had to think about. The libel insurance. The legal department on retainer. The anti-SLAPP muscle. The security desk that fielded the threats. Bodyguards. The financial reserve deep enough to outlast a lawsuit, and the plain deterrent weight of being an entity with money and lawyers, which most predators decline to attack. The reporter borrowed all of it simply by carrying the press pass from their institution. Reach and protection arrived together, welded, and the welding was so complete that almost no one noticed the protection was there at all.

Democratization of visibility broke the weld. A Substack can now out-circulate a mid-size daily — or in my own case, become the single most-read local print publication in the state of New Mexico. A twenty-three-year-old in a salon can gather an audience a 1985 columnist would have envied. The reach survived the collapse of the institution — but so too did every shield fall off at once.

What remains now is a person with the visibility of a celebrity or famous news anchor, but the defenses of a random stranger on the street — which is to say, none. Worse than a stranger, in fact, because the influencer has traded a celebrity’s distance for its exact opposite: she broadcasts her real-time location, her home interior, her salon, her daily route, her face at unnervingly close range, and she is reachable directly, in the messages, by anyone who feels moved to reach. Entire online accounts exist to showcase the skills of random people in locating other people on social media based on nothing but the stoplight in the background. We are, all of us in the social media spotlight, imminently findable now, to anyone who desperately wants to find us.

The A-list star who is stalked has a compound, a publicist buffer, a bodyguard, a legal team, a machine that reconstitutes most of what the old institution once supplied. The influencer with the same intensity of fame has a folding table and a phone.

Christina Grimmie is the hinge case history keeps handy: a YouTube singer famous enough to be fixated upon, not protected enough to be shielded, shot dead by an obsessed fan at a meet-and-greet. The industry sells women celebrity-grade exposure and hands them the bill for the consequences, itemized in stalkers and strangers and men who mistook a livestream for a relationship.

For what it’s worth, this is why I do not tend to respond directly to messages and emails my readers send me. I have learned, the hard (but not the hardest, knock on wood) way that too many people will believe any response from me whatsoever means we are friends, and that this “friendship” comes with expectations of me that, if not met, will drive some people into an absolute rage or delusions.

When the crowd turns

Consider the man who helped invent the modern crowd.

Twenty years ago, Perez Hilton built a career — and a fortune — training a digital mob on the famous. His specialty was cruelty aimed at people who were somewhat enabled to absorb it: young stars, Britney Spears foremost among them, ridiculed for sport in an era before anyone called it what it was. What his targets had, and what he did not know he was demonstrating they had, was infrastructure. Handlers. Publicists. Families and teams and, eventually, conservatorships and legal apparatus — the whole protective scaffold of institutional fame that caught them, however imperfectly, when the crowd he aimed came for them.

This month, Perez Hilton harmed himself during a TikTok livestream and was hospitalized after what responders reported as a suicide attempt. Viewers watching in real time called for help; his sister removed his children from the house. She made a statement that conveyed her brother’s regrets for having bullied celebrities in the past, and told a crowd of new online bullies who direct their ire at him that he was trying to be a better person now. The comments under news stories about this demonstrate that the public is in no mood to forgive him.

He survived, and as of this writing remains under care, his family pointing to severe depression and a year of serious medical crises. I will not pretend to know the exact causes of one man’s despair, because no honest writer can. But the fact that Hilton chose to attempt to end his own life live, online, before a crowd of his bullies, seems to indicate a desire for some sort of reckoning with the poisonous limitations of online fame.

Two truths hold at once here. Hilton did real harm, including catty coverage of an issue I had with the development of my first novel at the hands of producer Ann Lopez (George Lopez’s now ex-wife), and a reckoning with the cruelty he built a career on is fair. But the public relish at his unraveling and violent self-harm is a different thing entirely — that is the vamp frame translated into a man, bitchy gay man who dared to hurt Miss Britney had it coming dressed up as justice, and it is no more accountability than a jeering crowd at a scaffold ever was.

Britney Spears had a machine to support her, however cruel that machine sometimes was to her. But the man who tormented her had a phone and an audience. He had built the tower, gained as much visibility as any other star but nowhere near the fortune, and then he stood on top of it in a thunderstorm, with no lightning rod to protect him.

I know that gap from the inside.

I am an independent investigative journalist. I have no newsroom behind me anymore, which means I have the freedom to publish what a newsroom might spike — but none of the protection a newsroom would have wrapped around me while I did it.

As we speak, the New Mexico courts have been turned against my family as an instrument of retaliation by powerful people in the Epstein protection network in New Mexico, to punish me for writing truthfully about them. Had I still worked for a corporate newspaper, I might never have been allowed to publish those pieces, though it I had, there would have been a legal team and lots of money behind the company, ready to defend me. The legal process is ongoing, and I’m fighting back as best I can. I have files with the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. I left the country in part for safety, realizing they would not stop at lawfare if I kept publishing about them — that pattern is well established, and what comes next after the things they’ve already tried (character assassination, harassment in the physical world through surveillance and stalking, physical attacks upon my property and my person, and lawfare designed to hurt my family members as a way to hurt me) is, frequently, murder.

Something similar happened to democrat and former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in June, when political opponents filed false charges of child abuse against him, forcing a brief separation from his children. This was retaliation for speaking out against the Trump administration. False charges were filed against me, of a similar nature, but about my elderly father. But where Buttigieg had the power of his political party and millions of dollars to fight back, I had nothing of the sort, and my father was removed from my care based on demonstrably false allegations that a judge whose name appears in the Epstein files as communicating with Epstein to help him make secret donations to Gary King’s gubernatorial campaign after Epstein was a known and convicted child sex trafficker. It’s not murder, exactly. But it’s extreme abuse, not just of me but mostly of my father.

The anomaly was the safety

We tell this story backward. We treat the exposed, unprotected voice as the frightening new mutation and the cushioned institutional one as the natural state that is eroding. History runs the other way.

The pamphleteer hunted for sedition, the exile printer, the samizdat typist copying pages by hand under a regime that would jail her for them — these are the norm across the long human record of people who spoke to the public without permission. The mid-century arrangement, in which a professional could reach millions from inside a fortress of insurance and counsel and physical security, was the strange interruption, a few decades long, of a much older and far more dangerous rule. The cushion was the anomaly. And an entire generation of us built careers, formed expectations, made plans for our safety and our families, on the assumption that the anomaly was the floor.

The floor is gone. The visibility stayed. The substitutes now assembling to replace the old protection — the press-freedom nonprofits, the anti-SLAPP statutes that exist in some states and not others, the legal defense funds, the digital-security collectives — are real, and thin, and improvised, and their thinness is the whole vulnerability. A twenty-three-year-old in a salon, a book blogger, a teenager promoting girls’ education, a gossip columnist twenty years past his cruelty, an investigative reporter filing from exile: we are all standing on the same tower, in the same weather, reaching the same enormous audience in the same unending electrical storm, and reaching it is exactly what marks us to be struck.

Democratization of social media handed everyone a broadcast tower and took away the lightning rod.

The creators killed on camera this year are what the storm looks like when it finds the tallest figure with the least protection.

The rest of us are simply further down the same open field, watching the sky, hoping the next strike lands somewhere else.

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or a mental-health crisis, help is available. In the U.S., call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, staffed around the clock. Readers elsewhere can find local crisis lines through Befrienders Worldwide (befrienders.org) or the International Association for Suicide Prevention (iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres).

Sources: Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (Oxford Univ. Press, 1992) — subtitle corrected from your note; Benedict is at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism; the white-victim preference and pro-male language bias are documented in the book itself. Gwen Ifill coined “missing white woman syndrome” in 2004. Race/coverage disparity: Zach Sommers, “Missing White Woman Syndrome” (J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 2016); Gilchrist 2010 (the ~6x figure); Slakoff on women/girls of color in crime news; the Wyoming MMIW figures (homicide rate 6.4x that of white women, ~18% of coverage — via Reuters). Blackfishing / Kardashian effect: Wanna Thompson’s 2018 thread (origin of the term); Wesley Stevens, “Blackfishing on Instagram” (Social Media + Society, 2021); TIME, “The Kardashians’ Legacy of Blackfishing and Appropriation” (2021); NBC News on Black influencers calling out blackfishing. UN Women / UNODC Femicides in 2024 brief (the 83,000 / 50,000 / 137-a-day / stalking figures); ACLED expert commentary on the Gastelum killing (Sinaloa attack counts, “cartelization”); CBS News, BBC, Reuters on Márquez; Wikipedia + BBC on Sana Yousaf; CBS New York on Mejia-Polanco; IBTimes/CBS on Gastelum; CNN, Washington Post, NBC, Variety, CBS Miami on the Perez Hilton hospitalization.

Subscribe now

Share

Tip Jar

The Trump administration is ramping up its use of the “justice” system to persecute prominent leftists, concocting “crimes” to justify terrorizing people who pose a threat to genocide, white supremacism and hate groups. What’s happening should scare the shit out of everyone reading this.

When you look at two recent such indictments together, you see a patterns similar to the disgraceful McCarthy witch-hunt era, but even more devious, dangerous, secretive and deceptive.

James “Fergie” Chambers — a self-described communist, and heir to the Cox communications fortune, is one of the first to have been arrested. He sits in a Madrid, Spain, prison awaiting possible extradition on charges by the Trump administration, of international money laundering “with the intent to provide material support” to a foreign terrorist organization. His actual “crime” appears to have been something else — donating a large amount of money to a hospital in Gaza that was helping Palestinian children orphaned and injured by Israel’s genocide against them.

Heidi Beirich is another. She ran the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence project for the better part of two decades and built the country’s most detailed map of the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys, and the neo-Nazi underground. I used her work when I was writing my novel, HOLLOW BEASTS, about white supremacist terrorist groups. She was arrested at her home in Palm Springs last week, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank.

One funded the fight against genocide abroad. The other spent her career fighting fascists at home. The Justice Department reached for the identical toolbox to come after both: the financial-crime statutes — laundering, wire fraud, bank fraud, material support — written for cartels and actual terror financiers (like the Proud Boys) and now aimed at the president’s political enemies.

This is a new and very frightening era in United States history, and I hope to God we are all paying attention. Because they won’t stop with Chambers and Beirich. They will come for anyone and everyone they don’t like, eventually. And considering they don’t like most Americans, that’s most of us.

What Beirich is actually charged with

Beirich led the SPLC’s Intelligence Project — the hate-tracking operation — and left in 2020 to co-found the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. The Trump administration hates people who combat hate. So she was arrested on August 12 and folded, by superseding indictment, into a criminal case the DOJ opened against the SPLC in April: an eleven-count indictment alleging the organization laundered money and defrauded donors through a now-shuttered program that paid confidential informants inside groups like the Proud Boys and the Klan. It’s a loophole. And like every good racist who loves a good old noose, Trump loves him some loopholes.

The government’s theory is that donors who gave the organization money to fight hate didn’t know their money was paying people embedded within the very groups the SPLC was mapping. And the indictment carries specifics that any honest account has to reckon with: prosecutors allege Beirich approved payments to an informant who was a Klan imperial wizard, and that she had a romantic relationship with a separate paid source, sharing a bank account into which roughly $140,000 in donor money flowed over six years.

The allegations are the Trump’s version of reality, unproven, and the SPLC calls the entire prosecution what it plainly is — retaliation against them for going after the racist organizations Trump loves. The organization has moved to dismiss on the grounds that it is the target of a vindictive prosecution by a president it spent years cataloguing.

What Chambers is actually charged with

Chambers was seized in Ibiza on July 10, six police vehicles boxing in his car while his family watched, and has been held without bail in Madrid since. The lead count is money laundering tied to his time in Tunisia — the government says he moved roughly $7.5 million to benefit Hamas, designated a foreign terror organization by Washington since 1997. His partner says the money sponsored a Tunisian football club, Club Africain, and cleared its debts and overdue salaries — and that the indictment never shows how a dollar reached Hamas. A second count ties to a 2023 protest in New Hampshire at an Elbit Systems facility.

His new lead counsel is Baltasar Garzón, the former Spanish National Court judge who coordinated Julian Assange’s defense. The extradition itself is historic: under National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which directs federal agencies to pursue “American citizens residing abroad” whom the Trump administration doesn’t like, Chambers is the first person Washington has tried to drag home across an international border. Spain’s National Court handles the judicial phase, with the Council of Ministers holding the final say, and the U.S. reportedly has until August 26 to file its full dossier or see him released. To be clear, Spain has not yet decided whether or not they will hand Chambers over to the Trump ghouls. We’ll find out soon, though.

Two nodes in a machine

Chambers and Beirich are not the whole of it. They are the two most visible points on a map that already has many more, and is gleefully collecting others as we speak.

In Texas, nine defendants tied to what prosecutors branded a “North Texas Antifa Cell” were charged over a 2025 armed confrontation at the Prairieland immigration detention center — the first domestic use of the federal material-support statute against protesters. They were sentenced this June. One man received 100 years. Others who never fired a weapon drew decades, ratcheted up by terrorism sentencing enhancements. One, who wasn’t even there, was imprisoned for having written a dissenting ‘zine and moved it from his own house to his parents’.

In Michigan, on the morning of June 10, the FBI ran multi-state raids and indicted eight pro-Palestine activists — six of them current or former University of Michigan students — over a campaign to pressure the school into divesting from Israel. The charges: conspiracy to transmit threats across state lines, witness tampering, destruction of property. The tell is in the history: Michigan’s own Democratic attorney general had dropped the earlier state case against these protesters in 2025, and the Trump DOJ federalized it. Civil-rights lawyers say the charges are overbuilt, that prosecutors never identify the specific threats the statute requires.

And the machine reaches past protesters to the people who fund them. The same day Trump signed NSPM-7, the DOJ directed U.S. Attorney’s offices to open investigations into the Open Society Foundations, the progressive grant network founded by George Soros — whom Trump named by name when asked whom the memo targets. This is the point of Beirich’s arrest: the front has moved from the street to the ledger. NSPM-7 directs not just the FBI and DOJ but the Treasury and the IRS to go after “anti-fascist” movements, and instructs the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate the institutions — the NGOs, the charities, the donors — alleged to sponsor them.

NSPM-7, signed September 25, 2025, created no new crime; there is still no chargeable offense called “domestic terrorism.” What it created was a target list and a mandate to reach for tools already on the shelf — conspiracy doctrine, material-support statutes, terrorism sentencing enhancements — run nationally through an entity called Joint Task Force Vanguard. It fundamentally changed WHO was considered a “terrorist” in the United States, moving that designation away from hate groups and placing it on anti-hate groups.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December implementation memo went further, ordering a five-year retrospective sweep of federal files on the left and directing the FBI to compile a list of groups by ideology: opposition to immigration enforcement, “radical gender ideology,” views deemed anti-capitalist or anti-Christian or anti-American. Reporting on the leaked memo described it soliciting public tips — a bounty system for anti-Trump thought — and reaching, in its own words, “organizations and entities,” a phrase broad enough to swallow book clubs and mutual-aid networks.

The administration has never hidden the design. At the State Department’s July “antifa summit,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller laid out the program in five verbs: “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute.” Defund. Debank. The financial mechanism at the heart of the Beirich and Chambers cases is not a prosecutorial accident. It is the stated policy, spoken aloud from a government podium.

This is a purge. And it is as violent and insane as it sounds.

This will escalate

Everything about the machine is built to expand, and its own documents say so. All those concentration camps? They’re not just for “immigrants.”

The Bondi memo’s five-year lookback means the FBI is combing years of old files for anything that can be repackaged as a case. The target list is a list precisely so that names can be added to it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the July summit — sixty-five countries in the room — to announce that more groups would be designated and to carry the campaign across borders, the same extraterritorial logic that put Chambers in a Spanish cell. And the man now running the Justice Department has said plainly that the SPLC case is not finished: newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche said more arrests are coming.

Read that as the promise it is. A machine with a five-year lookback, a growing designation list, an IRS-FBI unit built to investigate nonprofits, and an attorney general announcing further arrests does not wind down. It accelerates. The two cases in front of us this month are not the crest of the wave. They are the part of it that has surfaced. And this is a motherfucking tsunami.

The same instrument, pointed one way

The conduct the Justice Department is treating as career-ending federal crime — routing money in ways that touch a designated terror entity, misstating finances to a bank, taking in funds from people who lose while you profit — is on open display inside the Trump family’s own portfolio. The difference is that when the president does it, it is not prosecuted. It is disclosed, defended, and in the crypto case written into law.

Consider the mechanisms, matched one to one.

Chambers is accused of laundering money that benefited a designated terror organization. The Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, runs its USD1 stablecoin on Binance — the exchange that, as Public Citizen has documented, facilitated billions of dollars in transactions for Iran and for designated terrorist entities. A UAE sovereign fund poured $2 billion into Binance using that same stablecoin. The rails that enriched the president’s sons are the rails that moved money for the sanctioned. One man faces decades for a transfer the government struggles to trace to Hamas. The other family cleared hundreds of millions on infrastructure with a documented terror-finance problem, and no one has been arrested.

Beirich is charged with submitting false statements to a bank. A New York court found that Donald Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization deceived banks and insurers for years by inflating asset values on financial statements to secure better loans — at one point valuing a Trump Tower triplex at three times its actual size. An appeals court threw out the half-billion-dollar penalty last year as an excessive fine, but the panel let the finding of fraud stand. Bank deception, judicially established, at the top of the executive branch. Bank deception, alleged, at a defunct anti-hate nonprofit. Only one of them ends in handcuffs.

The SPLC is accused of defrauding donors who lost money that they didn’t know where went. Nearly 500,000 investors in the president’s own memecoin lost a collective $3.8 billion, even as Trump disclosed hundreds of millions in personal earnings from it — part of $1.4 billion in crypto income in his first year back in office. Donors who lose while the principal profits: that is the government’s theory of the SPLC case, and it is the documented arithmetic of the $TRUMP coin.

The White House denies any conflict. Trump says outside institutions manage his investments and that he never speaks with them; asked about the UAE money, he said his sons handle it and he doesn’t know the details. Those denials belong in the record, and here they are. But notice what they concede: the defense is never that the money didn’t move or that the foreign funds didn’t arrive. The defense is that the president shouldn’t be held responsible for the machinery bearing his name — precisely the argument the DOJ refuses to extend to Heidi Beirich, held responsible for the machinery of an organization she left in 2020. And where the president’s crypto profits are concerned, Republicans are not merely declining to prosecute; the ethics provisions moving through the Senate this year were drafted around his memecoin and World Liberty holdings so the conduct stays legal for him while the prosecutions proceed against everyone else.

The man holding the gavel

The tell is in whose hand is on the weapon, in this case, a gavel.

The official who announced that more SPLC arrests are coming is Attorney General Todd Blanche — the same Todd Blanche who, before he ran the Justice Department, was Donald Trump’s personal criminal-defense lawyer, the man who stood beside him through the New York hush-money case that ended in a 34-count felony conviction. He was confirmed 50–49 in August, one of the closest votes for an attorney general in modern memory.

And look at what nearly sank him. Blanche’s confirmation almost failed over his role in establishing Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund — a pool critics called a slush fund to compensate Trump allies, including those who rioted at the Capitol on January 6 — and a related deal granting Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from tax audits. So the man now deploying financial-crime statutes against the anti-fascists and the anti-genocide activists is the same lawyer who defended the president against his own financial-fraud reckoning, and who helped build a fund to pay the president’s friends and shield the president’s family from the taxman. The asymmetry isn’t a pattern anymore. It’s a résumé.

This was foretold in Project 2025

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership did not draw up a plan to charge leftists with terrorism, not exactly. Its DOJ chapter, written by Stephen Miller’s ally Gene Hamilton, instead posed as the opposite: it complained that the FBI wrongly branded white supremacist conservatives “domestic terrorists” and demanded an end to the “weaponization” of justice against their own kind. Unspoken was the plan to weaponize the justice system against their own enemies, perceived or real.

What the document actually built was the precondition — a DOJ and FBI stripped of independence and placed under direct presidential control, career civil servants replaced by loyalists, the FBI director’s term protections eliminated, investigations to be reviewed and killed at political direction. That is the engine. NSPM-7 and the Bondi memo are what pointed it at the left. The blueprint supplied the machine; the memos supplied the targets. Time found that nearly two-thirds of Trump’s early second-term executive actions mirror Project 2025’s proposals.

There is a final, exact irony here. One of the most incisive published dissections of Project 2025 — the analysis that called it “the far-right playbook for American authoritarianism” — was written by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. That is the organization Heidi Beirich co-founded after leaving the SPLC. The woman now under arrest is among the analysts who mapped the machine before it was turned on her.

She saw it coming. And it came, first, for her.

Question is: What are we as Americans going to do about it?

THE PUGILIST is following these cases and will update as they move.

Leave a Tip

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a Tip

This video was just released anonymously on Facebook, a social media platform owned by META and Mark Zuckerberg. META, which has been fined for endangering children and attempting to sway elections, immediately took it down. I recorded it on my phone screen before they banned it.

Please watch. There is no way to verify who the person is in the video, nor whether what she says is true. But my instinct (and my guides) tell me it is real and true. Make of that what you will. Her words match everything the Zorro Ranch and New Mexico Epstein protection network investigations led me to uncover, and more. If you are unable to stream the video, here is the transcript:

I have been trafficked to at least four of the eight presidents that have been alive in my lifetime. Presidential trafficking for sexual espionage does not belong to any one political party or group. It spans the political and religious spectrum, because blackmail is a form of currency. While this spans the political spectrum, many of the specific networks I was personally trafficked in are — unfortunately, many of my traffickers are back in this current administration. They hold positions in the U.S. Cabinet, the Senate, and other very high seats of power in this administration. I do not want people to take away from this that the problem with trafficking solely belongs to the Trump administration. It does not. I was initially trafficked INTO the Trump administration, by members of a previous presidential administration, for the express purpose of spying on his administration officials and reporting back. What survivors are really tired of is the left blaming elite trafficking on the right, and the right blaming elite trafficking on the left, and nothing changes. While everyone is fighting amongst themselves about which side is worse, trafficking victims pay the price. We don’t get free. And we are dying.

This is what I have been trying to get my readers to understand: Both parties, under the control of intelligence organizations, have been trafficking children (and adults) at least the 1950s as a form of blackmail for political currency.

THIS is why the full and unredacted Epstein files have not been released, despite all the lawsuits and political posturing: Because neither United States dominant political party WANTS or can AFFORD to have the files released.

The files implicate ALL OF THEM. And with very few exceptions, the powerful in both parties believe the “sacrifices” forced to be made by children and others who were trafficked and continue to be trafficked ARE WORTH IT. Because it keeps them, the self-perceived “good guys,” in power. Collateral damage, like any other. The ugly workings of the sausage factory.

The existing released files about New Mexico show, with just a little extra digging, that United States intelligence operatives have infested both parties with corporatist neoliberal monsters who are willing to do anything, literally ANYTHING, to blackmail one another, themselves, other nations, anyone and everyone who stands in the way of CORPORATE power and influence. It becomes a sort of game to this type of person.

This depravity, however, is NOT acceptable to the majority of American people, and the monsters know it. So they have all now agreed to essentially keep it all hidden while jousting about it in the public square to win elections. So now the Epstein files become yet one more tool for each party to pretend sanctimony, one more big neon arrow to point at The Proverbial Other Guy, while ALL OF THEM know it’s a joke, and the joke’s on us, the American people, whose money the monsters use for this bullshit.

If journalists and media outlets you trust and like are only reporting on Epstein as though his sex trafficking was connected JUST to Trump and the GOP, they are not telling the whole story because they are protecting their own employers.

This likely includes people like Katie Phang, who you might think are on your side because they're going after truly reprehensible monsters like Donald Trump and Todd Blanche. But Phang is also blocking anyone who suggests democrats like former NM AG Gary King and former US Attorney for NM John J. Kelly might have also be involved with Epstein and aware of the child sex trafficking, or that the NM AG is part of covering that all up. The whole truth doesn’t fit the democratic party “winning” narrative going into the midterms, so they leave out the inconvenient parts. When Brandon Padilla called my friend to threaten me, to tell my friend in politics to shut me up, he said it was because “Alisa isn’t spinning the story the right way.”

That’s because actual journalists do NOT spin stories. That’s the job of propagandists and publicists.

That Phang and others on here would rather pretend I’m lying about their attacks upon me than they would like to tell the truth about ALL the powerful people involved in the Epstein coverups (yes, plural) is all the proof I need that she and others are likely paid operatives — “friends,” if you will — of the democratic party establishment, and NOT JOURNALISTS. They pretend to be journalists, because the American people crave real information, they need and want journalism.

But, friends, listen to me. Journalists tell the truth, even if it makes their own political party look bad.

So, no. Do not trust any “independent” outlet that pretends Epstein was all about Trump and Blanche alone. You know who they are. Meidas Touch. Aaron Parnas. Lev Parnas. Even sweet little Ellie Leonard. These are people who pretend to be on your side, but in truth they are working only on the side of what you have come to regards as the lesser evil, whether knowingly or unknowingly through manipulation. The coordination in their ostensibly “grassroots investigations” proves it to anyone paying attention.

There is so much evidence of bipartisan involvement in almost everything that passes for “independent” media coming out of the USA today, even here on Substack. And all I can say about that is: OF COURSE THERE IS. Of course intelligence operatives for these organizations are going to plant people here, where trust is high and real voices abound. And of course those people will rally to try to discredit anyone who is not spinning the message THEIR way.

Any supposed journalist who is not making it clear that both political parties were in bed with Epstein, any supposed journalist who is insisting the obstruction lies only with the GOP, is lying. Knowingly lying and covering up the parts they don’t like, perhaps for what they believe is a greater good.

That greater good, just so we are clear about it, is THEIR continued access to power, and that power begins and ends with the riches contained within the walls of the United States Treasury. Every criminal’s dream heist.

Yes. I know it sucks to hear this. We want heroes. We need them. But this powerful uniparty that masquerades as two parties is going to make sure those heroes, if they exist at all, women like the one in this video, are disappeared before you have time to connect.

The complicity crosses all parties with any real POWER. Which is why the PEOPLE need to take our power BACK from monsters.

Unity. Decency. Empathy. For a new USA.

If my work speaks to you, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or leaving a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Your support makes this work possible.

Leave a Tip

Subscribe

Share

Leave a Tip

Share

Subscribe now

Growing up in New Mexico as I did, you hear about them. The kids, almost always boys, very often disruptive in some obvious and exhausting way, almost always trouble, who get disappeared to “Nimi” for “straightening out,” as in: If you don’t stop setting frogs on fire/fondling the neighborhood girls/failing all your classes/breaking into school and overturning all the desks, Billy/Johnny/Kevin, your dad/mom/grandpa is going to send you to Nimi to straighten yer happy ass out.

One day, they’re there, throwing rocks at you for having an immigrant parent, say, or commenting on your bra size (you’re thirteen) as they follow you home from school, a little ragtag group of similar cruel-eyed degenerates sniveling along behind them in their wake. The kinds of boys that make you lock the door behind you once you make it safely home. The next day, their carved-up desk sits empty and no one talks about them much anymore, except to say, eyes wide in warning, I heard his folks shipped him off to Nimi.

Decades later, you see his name in the news. He’s a spy. He’s overthrown a government. He’s assassinated a foreign leader.

He’s the Attorney General of the United States of America.

What Is The New Mexico Military Institute?

While most of us have heard of the fancy private boarding schools and prestigious Ivy League and military colleges that produce the polished J. Crew shoppers who go on to lead the nation from podiums with their gleaming smiles — places like Andover, Exeter, Yale, West Point — there is one boarding school that is just as influential but far less well-known, forgotten in dusty Roswell, New Mexico, a school that functions as an early pipeline into the more secretive forms of power that intelligence recruiters say requires, if not outright sociopathy, sociopathic tendencies. That school is the New Mexico Military Institute.

New Mexico Military Institute is a blonde-brick fortress, a large citadel located a block from Jazzercise Roswell, two blocks from the Cattle Baron steakhouse, and a mere pebble’s toss from the Dairy Queen Grill & Chill.

Founded in 1891 — back when New Mexico was merely a United States territory, 21 years before it was ordered to become a state — it’s a national oddity across several markers.

• One: It’s the nation’s only publicly-funded co-ed militarized boarding high school.

• Two: It’s the only boarding high school in the United States that also houses a boarding junior college on the same campus. Until 2022, students grades 9 through college sophomore shared dorm buildings.

• Three: A weirdly high proportion of its graduates go into government and military intelligence operations.

• And four: It produced Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and yes-man who this week was narrowly confirmed as the new dead-eyed, pedophile-protecting, almost-robot Attorney General of the United States of America.

The New Mexico Military Institute writes the highest honor of American espionage into its own rulebook. Its Hall of Fame criteria for “eminence” formally list the Distinguished Intelligence Cross and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal of the CIA among the achievements that qualify a graduate for enshrinement. The school does not merely produce men who drift toward the covert world. It defines that world’s darkest medals as the summit of what a life can amount to.

Its own pantheon proves the point. Consider Nestor Daniel Sanchez, class of 1950, who spent three decades in the CIA's covert operations and rose to chief of its Latin America Division. He was part of the 1954 coup that toppled Guatemala's elected government and installed a military dictatorship — the opening act of a civil war that would kill some 200,000 people, culminating in genocide against the Maya. He was the case officer who, on the day John Kennedy was shot in Dallas, ran the Paris operation that handed a Cuban asset a CIA pen rebuilt into a poison syringe, meant to inject Fidel Castro. He was closely tied to the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. And after retiring from the agency, he moved to the Pentagon as a Reagan Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, steering U.S. military aid to the Central American forces of the 1980s dirty wars — later linked by federal investigators to the illegal Contra arms pipeline that became Iran-Contra — an operation with documented links to Jeffrey Epstein. The school inducted Sanchez in 1993, the year Epstein bought Zorro Ranch from the then sitting governor of New Mexico, as a man of eminence. The honors it treasures are the honors he earned.

This is the institution’s revealed character, stated in its own documents: the place where the difficult kid is sent to be hardened even more, and where the hardest thing a graduate can become is an instrument of the state’s most violent and secret work.

New Mexico Military Institute enrolls roughly 870 to 980 cadets each year — the school markets the figure as "nearly 1,000" — across a combined public high school (grades 9–12) and a two-year junior college, though the federal IPEDS count of about 460 reflects only the postsecondary junior-college side. The corps is roughly 80 percent male and 20 percent female, a ratio of about four to one, with women having been admitted since the school became fully coeducational in 1977. Cadets come from around 45 states, two U.S. territories, and about 35 foreign nations; international students make up a substantial share, reported between roughly 14 percent on the college side and about a quarter of the full corps, with the largest contingents historically drawn from Mexico, China, and Vietnam. The student body is majority out-of-state or foreign — roughly 60 to 67 percent — and financially mixed: about a third of students receive federal Pell grants, and a large majority receive some form of grant or scholarship aid, against a tiered tuition structure in which New Mexico residents pay about $2,000, out-of-state North American residents about $8,880, and international students from outside North America the highest rate, for a total cost of attendance above $31,000.

A negligence lawsuit against NMMI alleges that in 2019 a fifteen-year-old girl who reported being raped on campus was told by a staff sergeant to sleep it off, and accuses the school of failing to address a pattern of sexual violence on its premises. Two cadets involved in the assault were criminally charged for rape. Kiarion Freeman and David Johnson were arrested after allegedly entering a dorm room and assaulting an incapacitated female cadet. Freeman pleaded guilty and was sentenced.

Additional criminal cases have involved NMMI cadets, including the 2023 arrest of a former cadet, Marco Varela, on charges of second-degree criminal sexual penetration.

In a separate case, a cadet enrolled there pleaded guilty in federal court to producing and distributing child pornography while a student.

These are the documented facts of an institution that could not, or would not, protect the children and especially not the female children inside it. An institution that produced Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, who is now in charge of the federal department of justice.

Apropos of nothing, it’s interesting to note that among NMMI’s most famous graduates are pornographic actress Jessica Jaymes, and Playboy Clubs executive Victor Lownes. Other famed graduates include actor Owen Wilson, and Conrad Hilton, the hotelier, his son, Conrad Hilton, Jr., and news anchors Sam Donaldson and Chuck Roberts.

I’m bracing for the flood of emails and comments I’ll get for writing this piece, the I went to NMMI and I turned out fine, you deserve to die you fucking c%nt kinds of screeds that lack self reflection to such degree they will not see the ways their attacks simply prove my point.

So let me say this now, and plainly: I’m sure some of you went to NMMI and turned out okay. I’m sure many of you are proud to have gone there, are passionately loyal towards the place, and look back on your time there fondly. Militarized schools tend to breed a fierce sort of loyalty, the kind of loyalty that feels dangerous to question. So, I get it that you might not be able to question yours.

But I am also sure that the school terrifies me, just as I am sure it has produced more than its share of monsters — including several with direct ties to the powerful network of men protecting famed child sex trafficker and likely Mossad agent Jeffrey Epstein.

Bear in mind, too, that one woman’s monster is another man’s hero.

And if you’re the type to think someone like Todd Blanche, the amoral and horrifying new Attorney General of the United States of America, is a hero, then I suggest with all the kindness in my heart that the rest of this article might not be for you.

Do not keep reading.

Do something, anything, else.

Why Todd Blanche Was The Perfect NMMI Student

Todd Wallace Blanche arrived at NMMI as a high schooler. I’m not sure of the year he arrived, and no one will confirm it for me. What I do know for sure is that he graduated in 1992, and that in 1992, the person at the top of NMMI was, as it always is, the Governor of New Mexico, who, at the time, was Bruce King. I also know that in the following year, 1993, Bruce King, still governor and still in charge of NMMI, sold a portion of his own personal family ranch to a guy from New York named Jeffrey Epstein. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll get back to this. First, let’s talk about Todd’s childhood, and why he was typical of the kind of kid who ends up at NMMI.

Todd was born in Denver, Colorado. For those of you unfamiliar with United States geography, Colorado is a U.S. state that borders New Mexico, another U.S. state, in the north. Todd’s dad was a Canadian immigrant to the United States. The man was also a professional athlete, a hockey player, and a basement preacher who formed his own church in Todd’s childhood home. Now, I wasn’t there. So I can’t say I know this for sure. But my limited experience with both hockey players and defiant basement preachers tells me there is a good chance Todd’s dad was narcissistic and authoritarian and possibly a spare-no-rod kinda guy. Psychologically, this would make sense. It would have created a guy who, as a lawyer many years later, would feel comfortable with a person like Donald Trump.

Anyway, when Todd’s dad got in trouble because his home-church pissed off the neighbors because it was loud and disruptive, Todd’s dad fought back and ended up in jail for contempt. The whole ordeal inspired the family to move to Florida. Todd, meanwhile, was not religious. You can imagine how well that went down with a dad like Todd’s dad. We should also mention that Todd appears to have been born with a cleft palate and “hairlip” that was surgically repaired somewhere along the way. Not sure how his dad would have felt about that, either. His mom was a nurse. I can’t tell you much more about her than that. Whatever happened in Todd’s house, someone decided it was better for him to go to NMMI than to be around his parents anymore, and so he went. Stories floating around the internet say he was regarded as a good athlete, like his dad. I guess we have to assume that’s true.

It also appears true that Blanche — let’s switch to his last name now that the version of him we’re talking about is an adult — was a good student, at NMMI as well as in college and law school. He went from NMMI to LSU, then to Brooklyn Law School. After that, he clerked for federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties, and made himself a respected prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. (You know, the same SDNY that asked New Mexico to stand down in its first investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.) I think what I’m circling here is this: NMMI does not turn out dullards. You don’t get into NMMI just because your daddy is rich. You get in because you’re a certain kind of dangerous, a dangerous that can be molded and turned into something harder and more useful to power — the loyal, disciplined operator who has learned, young, that survival becomes thriving only by attaching yourself to power and never letting go.

Blanche eventually attached himself to the most powerful client available. He became Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer, standing beside the sharting tangerine wonder through the hush-money trial that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, through the classified-documents case, through the effort to overturn an election. Then the felon he defended returned to the White House and made him, in stages, Deputy Attorney General, then acting Attorney General, and now — permanently, over the objection of two Republican senators and every Democrat — the head of the Justice Department itself. From that chair he interviewed/coached Ghislaine Maxwell, saw her moved to gentler confinement, and declared the Epstein files closed with millions of pages still withheld.

The man who shut the drawer on the country’s largest child-trafficking investigation learned this particular brand of misogynistic and predatory discipline at a state-funded military school in Roswell, a school that was, when he was there, overseen by the man who sold Epstein Zorro Ranch.

So who is ultimately in charge of what happens at NMMI? The answer is clear: The governor of New Mexico, whoever that happens to be at the time, because they appoint the board of regents that manages the school.

In 1992, that governor was Bruce King, the man who sold Zorro Ranch to Jeffrey Epstein and whose son Gary King went on, as Attorney General of New Mexico, not only to protect Epstein, but to work with Epstein’s lawyers to create ways that Epstein could finance Gary’s run for governor without the public finding out. The King family also introduced Epstein to John J. Kelly, who served as Epstein’s personal POA for the purchase of the ranch in the same year he was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico by Bill Clinton.

Today, the governor is Michelle Lujan Grisham, whose own party has created the sham “Truth Commission,” a public relations damage control operation seemingly designed to create a public appearance of concern for Epstein survivors while in fact continuing the King family legacy of protecting Epstein and those in their own party who benefited financially from their associations with him.

The same commission last week released its first report, which reads to me like a textbook case of clumsy narrative control efforts by a political party intent upon protecting its own.

In that report, they said the new owners of Zorro Ranch, Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines, were fully cooperating with the supposed investigation the commission and NM DOJ are conducting. This was only true if you did not want or expect a warrant search. The search in March was a permission-based search. The New Mexico Department of Justice inexplicably did NOT seek a warrant search.

Did I mention where the father of Donald Huffines went to boarding school? Just… you know. Take a guess.

If you guessed that James L. Huffines Jr. attended NMMI, you would be correct. He was later enshrined in its Hall of Fame, honored as a man of eminence. He built an automobile and banking fortune in Dallas and moved through the hardest rooms of Texas conservative money. His son Don Huffines is a former state senator who now controls the treasury of Texas, and whose family secretly purchased Epstein’s Zorro Ranch from Karyna Shuliak, Epstein’s heir, in 2023.

They have been excavating it ever since.

The current president of the NMMI Board of Regents is M. Christina Montoya, a graduate of the school who is now a clinical social worker. She is the Vice President of New Mexico CASA Association, which provides court-appointed special advocates to children in foster care or otherwise at risk. Gary King sits on the board, despite calls for him to be removed due to his documented unethical associations with Jeffrey Epstein. Other members of the board have ties to King and to his wife, weapons scientist Yolanda Jones King.

Roughly a hundred cadets a year move from NMMI to the five United States service academies. Its Hall of Fame holds more than two dozen generals and admirals. And woven through its criteria for honor is that single, extraordinary line — the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Cross and Distinguished Intelligence Medal, named outright as qualifications for eminence.

Understand how rare that is.

Most institutions that feed the intelligence world do so quietly, through a wink and a professor’s recommendation and a quiet lunch in a wood-paneled room. NMMI wrote it into the bylaws. Out loud. The school announced, in its own founding documents of honor, that the highest thing one of its children could grow up to be is a keeper of the state’s most violent secrets, and those secrets know no political party.

As far as I can tell, NMMI is yet another node in the Epstein/Maxwell protection network, and that network crosses all party lines and points directly at military intelligence and defense contractors. My previous reporting has led to inferences that Epstein and Maxwell were working for foreign and possibly domestic military intelligence operations, and that their presence in New Mexico was possibly centered on obtaining nuclear weapons secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories.

The people who continue to protect Epstein, whether it’s a Republican like Todd Blanche or a Democrat like “Truth Commission” head Andrea Romero (a state representative from Santa Fe who took part in NMMI’s activities honoring the school’s princesses for the 2025-2026 school year, and who also, notably, removed gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland’s name from the Truth Commission’s first report), are protecting something much bigger than “just” a child sex trafficking ring, something with roots in the military-industrial complex that no one in power hopes you ever find out about.

I’ll end this with an actual promotional video put out by NMMI’s official account, with the band Portugal. the Man’s “Feel It Still” as the background music. The song includes the following lyrics:

Can’t keep my hands to myself
Think I’ll dust ‘em off, put ‘em back up on the shelf
In case my little baby girl is in need
Am I coming out of left field?

Ooh woo, I’m a rebel just for kicks, now
I been feeling it since 1966, now…

We could fight a war for peace
(Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now)
Give in to that easy living
Goodbye to my hopes and dreams
Stop flipping for my enemies
We could wait until the walls come down
(Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now)
It's time to give a little to the
Kids in the middle, but oh 'til it falls
Won't bother me

Buy Me a Coffee

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a Tip

At 11:52 on the night of May 13, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air lifted off from Roswell Air Center in Southeastern New Mexico and turned west toward the mountain town of Ruidoso. Four people were aboard: Captain Keelan Clark, thirty years old, a year and a half into his commercial license and one month into his fourth stripe; First Officer Ali Kawsara, twenty-three, two months on the job; and two flight nurses, Sarah Clark and Jamie Novick, riding in back to bring a patient home. The temperature was sixty-nine degrees. The sky was clear. The trip should have taken half an hour.

Eight minutes after wheels-up, the GPS went dark.

The crew knew it might. Two notices sat in their preflight briefing. One carried the military's own designator — WSMRNM GPS 26-13 — and warned that GPS could be unavailable across a wide footprint centered on White Sands, on a schedule that ran deep past midnight. The other told them the automated weather station at their destination, Sierra Blanca Regional, was out of service. So a medevac crew launched into a moonless night, over dark mountains, toward a field with no weather reporting, knowing the satellites might blink out. They launched anyway, because that is what medevac crews do, and because the whole U.S. military apparatus in New Mexico above them had decided this was a tolerable way to run an airspace.

One hundred miles west, the Air Force's 746th Test Squadron was running NAVFEST — an annual two-week exercise in which electronic-warfare units from across the armed services practice blinding satellite navigation. On actual civilian aircraft over New Nexico, in the same general area where the same military tested the first atomic bomb in 1945, sickening, poisoning and killing Americans, including my own mom. The Federal Aviation Administration had warned that GPS could be degraded up to four hundred miles out. The warning was real. The jamming was real. And on that nearly moonless night, over some of the darkest terrain in the continental United States, two young pilots suddenly had no magenta line to follow home.

What happened next is documented, second by second, in the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report on accident WPR26FA186, released June 18 and reconstructed in Wired by Jeff Wise but otherwise mostly ignored by the US propaganda news machine.

The crew reported the loss and asked Albuquerque Center for a heading. They asked to fly an instrument approach, then a second kind of instrument approach when the first proved impossible without GPS. An operations supervisor called the military and asked it to stop jamming. Around 12:05 a.m., the military complied. The King Air's GPS flickered back to life. Meanwhile the crew, waiting on vectors from a controller juggling three other planes that had also lost their signal that night, had overshot the landing pattern by ten miles. Then they saw the lights of Ruidoso through the windshield, cancelled the instrument approach, and asked to "go visual." The request was granted.

And the same supervisor turned to the military and cleared it to switch the jamming back on. For some asinine reason.

Roughly five minutes later, the King Air flew into the side of the Capitan Mountains, about 230 feet below the summit, at nearly ten thousand feet and full speed. Everyone died on impact. The wreckage sparked a fire that grew into a wildfire, burned for the better part of a month, and forced nearby communities to evacuate. The crash struck the ridge fourteen minutes before that night's jamming window was scheduled to close on its own. The military could have just stopped their idiotic exercise after they realized planes were struggling. They didn't.

Here is where the story turns more damning, not less, than the version rocketing around social media.

Once Clark and Kawsara reported the lights, abandoned their instrument approach, and accepted a visual, they were flying by eyeball — and at that point, whether the jammers ran or sat idle no longer touched how they aimed the airplane. A defense spokesman will tell you exactly that, and he will be technically right. The jamming did not fly the King Air into the Capitans. The disorientation did. The moonless black did. The decision to trade a stabilized instrument approach for a visual descent toward distant lights, with a ten-thousand-foot wall of rock lying invisibly in between, did. As one crash-investigation pilot put it, when a mountain rises up in the dark and swallows the lights you were flying toward, "you know you are in big trouble." That is a textbook controlled-flight-into-terrain, and the final report, when it lands in 2027, will likely name the crew's choices among the causes.

So ask the question the system would rather you skip. Why was a green crew — a captain with eighteen months' experience, a first officer with two — forced into that choice in the first place?

Because their tools were taken away by their own government playing war games with their lives. Strip the GPS, and two pilots who trained on it their whole careers were thrown back on ground-based beacons and mental geometry that airline veterans describe as the kind of thing that killed JFK Jr. Push them off their approach, hand them to a controller too busy to give timely vectors because three other aircraft were also blind, let them drift ten miles past the pattern, and the visual approach starts to look like the way out of the trap. The jamming built the trap. The crew stepped into it. Both things are true, and only one of them was avoidable by anyone wearing a uniform that night.

And the trap was not new. For years before this crash, air traffic controllers had been filing formal safety reports about the White Sands jamming through NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System, according to reporting by IEEE Spectrum, which reviewed the filings. In late 2021, a controller wrote that a request to halt the jamming had been refused outright, and that refusing to stop was commonplace. A 2024 filing described the delay in pausing jamming as a danger to the flying public. The people running the airspace over southern New Mexico had been warning, in writing, on the record, for years, that this exact scenario was coming.

They simply didn't care.

So when a supervisor cleared the jammers to resume the instant one crew said "field in sight" — with three other planes in the same sector still degraded, and a quarter hour left on a window that would have expired on its own — that was the culture working as designed. Somewhere in that chain, night after night, a test's value got weighed against a pilot's ability to know where the ground was, and for years the test kept winning.

What happened to that supervisor? Publicly, nothing. The NTSB names no individuals in a preliminary report and assigns no cause; it will not until 2027. The Army will say only that it is "aware." The one accountability mechanism actually in motion belongs to our own delegation: Representative Gabe Vasquez has sent a letter to the NTSB and the Defense Department demanding a joint briefing, saying he has been briefed by the NTSB chair and that military technology played a role in the flight path of this crash. Whether that letter becomes a hearing, or evaporates into the Pentagon's favorite phrase — cannot comment while under investigation — is the fight worth watching.

Given how dependent the state economy and political infrastructure are on defense dollars, I would not hold my breath waiting for accountability. But can you imagine the uproar if, say, Iranian hackers had done this instead of our own military?

I also want to ask the question a New Mexican has to ask. Why here? Why is some horrid thing happening here, again, and being hushed up?

White Sands hosts this work because White Sands is considered empty. Remote, sparsely settled, disposable enough to absorb whatever the exercise throws off. That is the exact reasoning that put the first atomic bomb at Trinity, thirty-odd miles from where this King Air went down. The logic has never changed: the land is treated as vacant, the mostly rural, most poor people downwind treated as a rounding error. Subhuman. Collateral damage.

The Trinity downwinders like my mom have spent eighty years being told their cancers and deaths were the price of national security, and only recently pried the government's hand open far enough to be acknowledged at all. Now four coffins have come off a mountain, a month of wildfire has come off the same crash, and the families of Keelan Clark, Ali Kawsara, Sarah Clark and Jamie Novick have joined a long New Mexican tradition — the tradition of being what the country flies its experiments over because someone in a briefing decided nobody down there was quite important enough to protect.

And the pattern is spreading past our borders. In March of 2025, airliners landing at Reagan National got phantom collision alarms and aborted approaches; the Secret Service had been testing electronic-warfare gear near the vice president's residence. This past February, Customs and Border Protection's anti-drone lasers shut down airspace over El Paso and Fort Hancock, Texas. On July 7, a cargo 737 south of the Strait of Hormuz — a corridor thick with jamming from the U.S.–Iran fight — reported a navigation problem and then corkscrewed into the sea, killing five. GPS interference events reported to aviation authorities climbed from four in 2020 to fifty in 2024. The skies are being turned into a battlefield laboratory, and the aviation industry, still utterly dependent on GPS, is very slow to notice.

The difference in New Mexico is that we have seen this movie before. We know how it ends when Washington decides our sky and land near White Sands is a place to test a weapon, even with people there. We know because the mushroom cloud is still in our mothers’ and grandmothers' medical records.

Four coffins came off that mountain. The jammers were back on within minutes of the crew that died. And unless someone with the authority to change the procedure decides that a medevac crew's life outweighs an evening's worth of test data, the next Beechcraft is already fueling somewhere, and the next patient is already waiting.

Reporting drawn from the NTSB preliminary report (WPR26FA186, June 18, 2026); Jeff Wise's account in Wired (July 30, 2026); IEEE Spectrum's review of Aviation Safety Reporting System filings; and public statements from Rep. Gabe Vasquez's office. The investigation is ongoing; the NTSB's final probable-cause report is not expected before 2027.

I offer all my investigations, analysis and news for free, but your support is appreciated and necessary — now more than ever. Please like, share and comment. And subscribe. Paid, if you can spare $6 a month. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day allow me to write full-time. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a Tip

A reader named Kim Beckett informed me today that I write nothing revolutionary anymore, that all she sees is a woman posting pictures of food. She meant it as an indictment. I want to thank her for it, because she has handed me the exact subject I have been circling for three months.

James Baldwin left the United States because it was killing him. Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King — his friends, murdered one after the other, until the grief closed his throat and he could no longer write. He went to a small village in the south of France called Saint-Paul-de-Vence. People who misunderstood him called it desertion. He called it survival, and out of that exile he produced some of the most unsparing pages ever written about America.

Here is what he built there, in the hills above the Mediterranean, while the country he loved and flayed carried on without him: a table.

Friends gathered around it late into the night. He fed them. When a young writer he'd befriended came to him stung by a rejected fellowship, Baldwin's reply carried no lecture about the struggle — he told the man he had no fellowship to offer, but if he made it down south, there'd be a pork chop waiting. He was offering the thing the fight is actually for.

His final work, unfinished when cancer took him in 1987, was a play. He called it *The Welcome Table*. The title comes from the old spiritual — *I'm gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days* — where the welcome table is the seat the faithful reach at the end of everything, the place no one can deny them. Henry Louis Gates, who sat at Baldwin's real table as a young journalist, called it a metaphor from the Black sacred tradition: the place the good go when they die.

Consider what that means, coming from him. The man who wrote the fire and the rage of the century chose, for his last testament, to write a dinner party. Hospitality. Rest. Community. Exiles gathering to set their burdens down. One friend described the real table as a place of witness, somewhere the displaced could finally lay their souls.

So when I am told that food is not revolutionary, I understand that the person telling me this has mistaken the weapon for the war.

The people who need me miserable in order to believe I am serious have swallowed the oldest lie the powerful ever told: that the oppressed prove their worth through suffering, that a woman in a fight forfeits her claim to a good meal and good light and a dog asleep in the sun. Misery is the condition they want to keep us in. My joy in Spain is not a retreat from the American emergency. It is evidence. It is the photograph of what we are fighting to be allowed — a life. A table. Food we did not have to run for.

I have filed radical reporting every week for three months, while homeless, while crossing three countries, while running from the very forces I name. And yes, between the exposés, I have shown you my lunch.

Baldwin ran, too. Then he set a table and called the world to it. I am setting mine. The invitation stands for everyone — even Kim Beckett, especially Kim Beckett. Pull up a chair.

Subscribe

Share

Buy Me A Coffee

Leave a Tip

Subscribe now

Share

Yesterday, August 5, 2026, the New Mexico Epstein “Truth Commission” — a subgroup of the state legislature created to supposedly investigate why child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was able to run a rape ranch outside Santa Fe from 1993 to 2019 without anyone in power there doing anything about it — released its first report, five days late.

The delay is the least of its problems.

I read the 119-page report so you don’t have to, but if you have a strong stomach, I suggest you read it too, because it is one of the most outrageous con jobs in the history of New Mexico politics, and everyone in the world needs to call it what it is: pure public-relations narrative control, designed to protect the many powerful and wealthy people of New Mexico’s Epstein Class.

The most shocking and blatant evidence of this commission being nothing but spin is this: The report names several people who flew on Epstein’s aircraft over the years, but pretends Deb Haaland, a democrat and the woman likely to be elected the state’s next governor three months from now, was not one worth mentioning. Haaland rode on an Epstein-chartered plane in 2014, when she was running for lieutenant governor, on a trip from New Mexico to Washington, D.C., with then-gubernatorial candidate, democrat Gary King. The report names King. It does not name Haaland.

The only way this makes sense is if every member of the commission and the law firm they paid $750,000 to lead this supposed “investigation” all had strokes at the same time. The only other way it makes sense is if the commission was never meant to reveal anything — because its true purpose is to perform investigation while actually controlling the narrative, to protect the powerful political class of the state, many of whom were close to Epstein and remain entangled in the financial and legal machinery he ran.

Consider how little investigating actually happened. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, the commission leaned on the publicly available DOJ files and existing news stories to trace Epstein’s history in New Mexico, and turned up little that was new.

Chair Andrea Romero admitted as much at the hearing: most of the information had already been public, and the commission could, in her words, “claim no scoop on this information.” They had hired an outside firm — the personal-injury firm Fadduol, Cluff, Hardy & Conaway, headquartered in Abilene, Texas, with a New Mexico office — to spearhead the work on a $750,000 contract. Roughly six months later, they had produced nothing the public did not already know. Their defense was that the report is the first official government account of Epstein’s crimes in New Mexico, which is simply another way of admitting they discovered nothing themselves.

The sad truth about this commission is now clear. The Democratic power structure of New Mexico, realizing how exposed it would be if the public grasped what the three-million-plus DOJ Epstein files released in January actually show, opted to preemptively perform concern — in service of doing exactly what this first report reveals: continue the coverup while gaslighting the public. It feels narcissistic. It feels sociopathic. And because this is New Mexico, where many elected officials are, yes, evil, but also struggle with basic noun-verb agreement, it feels carelessly unsophisticated, obvious, and might also feel pathetic if it weren’t so goddamned dangerous.

I want to say something else before I get to some of the other coverups in this report. The Republicans are just as bad, nationally. They simply have little real power in New Mexico, a longtime Democratic stronghold. Epstein and Maxwell were entangled with powerful people in both major parties — Donald Trump himself not the least of them. The Epstein class have no ideology other than power for its own sake. But both parties are being dishonest about the files because they’re both politicizing them for selfish partisan gain, with no respect for reality, the truth, or the survivors. I am a journalist. My job is to tell the truth even when it is inconvenient to a political party. By and large, the news media in New Mexico and the country has devolved into partisan propaganda, with “reporters” who do little reporting and lots of parroting. I am not singling out New Mexico Democrats because I support Republicans. My own politics are far to the left. I’m singling them out because in New Mexico, over decades, they were the party taking money and favors from and covering up for Epstein.

Let’s move on.

Deb Haaland was on Epstein’s plane. The federal files prove it. Most local outlets have at least reported that much. But the state’s own “truth commission” wrote its report as though she never boarded — indeed, as though she did not exist at all. Her presence was not merely ignored; it was erased. The truth does not vanish because it is inconvenient to the party that runs this state.

Here are the facts in the publicly available DOJ files the commission ignored. On September 8, 2014, a private jet chartered through Epstein’s company flew from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C. Gary King — at the time the sitting attorney general of New Mexico — had personally reached out to Epstein’s assistants to ask to borrow Epstein’s own plane. The assistants relayed the request to Epstein and came back to say his plane was booked; Epstein then arranged to charter a similar private plane for King to use instead.

The flight was booked through JEGE LLC, one of Epstein’s companies, registered to his island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. King has said his campaign paid for the charter. What the campaign-finance records show is that Epstein’s companies were moving money into that campaign in the very same weeks: a $5,000 deposit from JEGE in July, $5,200 from JEGE in early September, and another $5,000 from an Epstein holding company, Maple, Inc., on the day of the flight itself. Who really paid, and how much, is exactly the kind of question a commission with subpoena power exists to resolve. But, of course, they did not subpoena King or his assistant, a woman identified in the files as Victoria. They have not subpoenaed people at all. Only institutions.

The trip was arranged by Epstein’s longtime personal pilot, Larry Visoski.

Five people were on the manifest: King; his running mate Deb Haaland, now the Democratic nominee for governor; and three campaign staffers, including an aide named Chris Khoury. The other two remain unnamed — information a commission with millions of dollars could easily have run down. It did not. I can make some educated guesses. Someone like Amanda Cooper might have been aboard. Cooper is a career Democratic fundraiser — a daughter of former U.S. Senator Tom Udall — who managed her father’s campaign and served as deputy campaign manager and finance director for Governor Bill Richardson’s presidential run. Richardson, another Democrat, spent years denying he was close to Epstein, despite survivor Virginia Guiffre naming him as one of her abusers, and denying he flew on his plane. After Richardson’s death, the released manifests named him as a passenger multiple times. Meaning: he fucking lied to your face. To all our faces.

I might also guess one of those unnamed passengers was another powerful New Mexican: James A. Noel. This is just conjecture, because without a commission willing to investigate, we might never know. Here is what is documented. In the Epstein files, a “Jim Noel” surfaces in messages relayed through Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff to Epstein’s lawyer and money manager, Darren Indyke, leaving increasingly urgent word that he needed to reach Epstein about Gary King — naming King directly — around the time of that 2014 flight.

Now consider who Jim Noel is, all of it public record. James A. Noel ran New Mexico’s Judicial Standards Commission from 2004 to 2009, served as a cabinet secretary under Governor Bill Richardson, and in 2008 moved to the Secretary of State’s office to oversee elections and campaign-finance reporting — a shift state Republicans attacked at the time as “a stunning conflict of interest.” The conflict was this: Noel is married to Amanda Cooper. In 2020, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham appointed Noel to the district-court bench in Sandoval County, where he now sits as a chief judge.

Line that profile up against the emails. A Jim Noel was pressing Epstein’s office about Gary King’s business in 2014, same year as the flight. The Jim Noel of the public record is not only a former assistant attorney general under King, but also a campaign-finance and judicial-ethics specialist, married into the Democratic fundraising apparatus that moved exactly this kind of money, wired into the same King-Richardson-Udall world it moved through. Every identifying detail lines up. Confirming whether the man in a sex trafficker’s inbox is the man now wearing a robe is precisely what a commission with subpoena power is for — a single request to Epstein’s estate, or to Groff or Indyke, would settle it. The commission never asked. It never mentioned him. A thread running from Epstein’s inbox toward a sitting New Mexico judge went untouched by the body created to follow such threads.

In its discussion of Gary King on that flight, the “truth commission” mentioned none of this. Just as it erased Deb Haaland, it worked its ass off to exonerate Gary King. And it’s likely hoping no one mentions Cooper or Noel.

The report says nothing about the publicly available files showing King’s campaign working with Indyke and Epstein to keep from the public that King kept taking donations from Epstein after his conviction. In February, the New Mexico Political Report documented that King accepted Epstein’s money routed through corporate fronts specifically to avoid press coverage — while King campaigned on his record prosecuting child sex offenders. The emails show King’s people and Epstein’s lawyer working to keep the donations out of view, funneled through shell companies so Epstein’s name would not surface on the campaign’s books. The commission treated none of it as worth mentioning. Instead, it reported that King said he returned the money and did nothing wrong.

What the commission kept, and what it cut

The commission tried to cover its own ass over its knowing, strategic erasure of Haaland by claiming it did not name “innocent people” who appeared on Epstein flights. Her omission would look like a rule — a blanket refusal to name any passenger — if the commission had followed one. It did not.

The report’s own flight-log analysis names former President Bill Clinton, aboard one flight. It names former Governor Bill Richardson, aboard five. It names the filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, aboard two. The report accuses none of them of wrongdoing in New Mexico — and it did not accuse Gary King, either. It named them anyway, because reconstructing a flight log means writing down who was on the flights. That is the entire purpose of the exercise.

The commission treated Haaland’s presence differently, and the only plausible reason is that the party wants to win in November and the truth could cost it that win. They do not care about the truth, the survivors, or accountability — for all the noise from officials like Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury about standing with survivors. They care about keeping their own power, at any cost. And I mean any.

New Mexico deserves better than the gangs of liars populating both parties, here and nationally. Survivors deserve better. It is up to us to tell the truth, and to work for comprehensive, systemic change.

I offer all my investigative journalism for free, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Covering the Epstein Class in a deeply corrupt state like New Mexico is dangerous work. I and other reporters like me are under attack by this depraved and sociopathic cabal. It caused me to leave the USA for Europe, at great personal and financial cost to my entire family. They want to silence me, but I won’t let them. Please like, comment, share and subscribe, paid if you can. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Thank you.

Leave a Tip

Subscribe now

Share

I know. I KNOW. I have only been here — what? Twelve. Twelve days. Nothing. But it did not take long for Madrid to help me realize that I, as a United States of America American, have been doing a lot of really messed up things that I thought were just… I don’t know. Normal. Life. Inevitable. And now I know better. So here are the ten things I’ve realized I not only do not HAVE to do anymore, but also that I do not WANT to do anymore.

1. Give it my all. An influencer I like posted a question this week: Are you giving it your all? Be honest with yourself. She stared hard at the camera. We were supposed to feel inspired. A year ago I’d have taken it as a challenge. Damn straight I’ma give it my all. Now it reads as a symptom. Giving it your all, every day, at everything, is a demand a healthy culture never makes of a person. A life lived at a walking pace turns out to be a full life, not a lazy one.

(While all my news articles are offered for free, my personal diary in exile is for paid subscribers only! It’s just $7 a month, though. And you get exclusive livestreams, too.)

Read more

Subscribe now

Share

Buy Me a Coffee

I knew something was weird in the world when many of you started breathlessly asking me in comments on unrelated posts whether people in Spain were worried about “the invasion over there.” It was the first I or anyone around me in Madrid, Spain, had heard of an invasion of Spain. Probably because there was no invasion of Spain. Just like there is no invasion of the United States.

That so many of you were deeply worried about said invasion in my new country of Spain speaks to a wholly distinct and very real invasion: The invasion of what was once a free and functional United States press corp by lapdog propagandists who serve only the genocidal white Christian nationalist agenda of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

American corporate media, across the ideological spectrum and not only on the right, converted last week’s relatively minor migration crisis at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta into anti-brown, anti-Muslim propaganda for the Trump administration’s racist and genocidal immigration agenda. The coverage erased the 72 people who died, which was the only real story you saw about the whole thing here in Spain. American propagandists pretending to be reporters buried the fact that most of the migrants had arrived because of a misunderstandings, and returned to Morocco within two days. The colossal spin of this story served not the truth, but a single hideous function: advancing the white-nationalist border politics of President Trump and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. They used the “news” out of Spain to terrify their racist base into believing the fantasy replacement theory was not just a threat to themselves, but to Europe.

Here are the facts the coverage displaced. Roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, a Spanish city on the North African coast, over a week beginning July 30. Spanish authorities recovered 72 bodies by Sunday; Morocco reported 11 more. The crossers included families and more than 800 children traveling without parents. Within 48 hours, Spain says, over 48,000 had gone back to Morocco, many voluntarily after finding no food, no shelter, and no way onward. Ceuta is a sealed enclave, not in mainland Spain. A migrant who reaches its beach cannot travel to mainland Spain or anywhere else in Europe without visa and identity checks. The people in the dramatic footage were going nowhere. Moroccan border forces opened the gates and then closed them, a maneuver Madrid reads as diplomatic pressure from Rabat.

Spanish media told that story. And they told it calmly and with compassion for the migrants. Outlets led with the tragic dead, tracked the rising toll, and pressed on accountability at home — a reported clash between the Interior and Defense ministries over an ignored intelligence warning, and the firing of a security officer who released migrant figures before the government was ready to admit them.

The overt distortion (read: whole-ass lies) came, predictably, from the American right. Fox News aired the breach footage on a loop, edited to look like a terrifying invasion of brown people, the usually racist bullshit they push. Miller, the most disgusting human to walk this earth, posted video warning that Democrats “will see your home trampled and stolen by invaders.” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly blamed Spain’s “far-left, globalist policies,” because any opening to make Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez into the next-best whipping boy to Zohran Mamdani, these fuckers take it. Trump, who has never met a brown or black person he did not wish he could buy or sell or simply murder, told his cabinet it looked like an invasion and warned the “same thing is going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected.” He told Fox to “remember that picture.” CNN reported he called the crisis a talking point for the midterms. The spun the hell out of a tragedy because it worked, and it didn’t only work with their base. It worked on many of my own readers.

The rest of American corporate media did the same work in a respectable register. The wire copy and the flagship papers led not with the drowned but with Washington’s reaction, granting the administration’s frame the top of the story and the weight of the headline. The Washington Post reported migrants “overrunning” a Spanish “outpost” and “stirring White House outrage” — the outrage, not the dead, as the news. The verbs did the ideological labor: “storm,” “surge,” “overrun,” “flood.” Dangerdangerdanger. As an actual jouralist, this spin makes me sick. These idiots took a contained event 3,500 miles away, resolved in 48 hours, and presented it to Americans as a glimpse of their own future if non-white, non-Christian people are allowed to FUCKING EXIST. Where the death toll appeared at all, it appeared below the politics. I’m almost surprised they didn’t express dismay that more hadn’t died.

That is how the frame launders reality. “Invasion” is not a description; it is the grammar of the “great replacement,” the white-nationalist fantasy that Western nations are being deliberately overrun by poor, Black and brown, Muslim outsiders. Miller shouted the word; the wire desks translated it into the neutral cadence of objectivity and delivered the same payload. Whether the language was “invaders” or “overrun an outpost,” the corporate press handed the administration a nationwide megaphone with a “genocide ‘R us” logo on the side, and pointed it at footage of Africans in the water.

The alignment ran deeper than a news cycle. A recent nonbinding congressional report described Ceuta and the enclave of Melilla as territories “administered by Spain, located in Moroccan territory” — endorsing Rabat’s claim in the same year Washington moved to make Morocco its top military and intelligence partner in Africa. The U.S. establishment mourned Spain’s border and questioned Spain’s title to it in the same breath.

Seventy-two people who believed they had a chance at a better life are dead, killed in the most horrific of ways, and all my birth country’s press corp and government can see is a fucking “invasion” that does not exist. A French woman with family in Morocco told Reuters she watched women carry two-month-old infants into the sea to die. That is the event. That’s what actually happened. Something tragic and scary, for the opposite reasons your press corp told you about. Everything American media stacked on top of it — the invasion, the warning, the midterm talking point — was a story told about those bodies by an industry that needed them to be a threat rather than the dead.

Make no mistake about it. This is the behavior of genocidal, racist empire. It was true 400 years ago. And it’s true now.

Please. For the love of God. Stop falling for it.

I’ll sign off by answering the question a few of you asked me, about this event. You asked me if I was scared. If the people in Spain were worried. The answer is yes. I am scared. And the people in Spain are worried. But not because desperate mothers in Africa took a deep breath and held their infants and walked into the sea with the biggest of prayers on their lips. We are scared and worried because the United States of America is run by dangerous sociopathic racists and liars, who are a threat to the entire planet.

Subscribe now

Share

Buy Me a Coffee

Buy Me a Coffee

Share

Subscribe now

MADRID, SPAIN — Every morning here in my new home city (I’ve been here all of 11 days), I fill a glass from the kitchen tap and drink the tasty, clean without a second thought. So does nearly everyone else in Madrid, said to have some of the finest tap water in all of Europe, a continent of fine tap water. Canal de Isabel II, the public utility that has carried water down from the Sierra reservoirs since Queen Isabel II sat on the Spanish throne, reports that more than nine in ten madrileños drink their water straight from the tap and are proud of it. The water is soft, low in minerals, and — this is the part that took less time that I had imagined to feel in my body rather than just know as a fact — trusted. I could literally feel the water changing my gut, for the better, which inspired me to write this piece. What I discovered, as often happens when I look into the things that strike me as unusual or interesting, is that there’s a very good reason people trust their water here the way Americans once trusted that a taco salad would not put them in the hospital or a morgue.

Walk the streets of Madrid and you notice something else. Very few people are fat. The contrast with the country I left — the United States — is not subtle. Nearly three in four Americans are overweight, with roughly 42 percent of American adults now meeting the clinical definition of obesity. Less than half the people in Madrid are overweight at all, with only 12 percent meeting the clinical definition of obesity.

Diet is the big lever, of course. Ultra-processed food makes up somewhere between half and sixty percent of the calories Americans eat, and study after study — in the U.S., France, Spain, Australia, the U.K. — ties that consumption to rising weight in a clean dose-response line regardless of the country. Portion size, car dependency, the price of fresh food, the engineering of crave: those are the cornerstones of the American obesity epidemic.

And yet…

And yet. Underneath the diet story sits a layer we almost never discuss, one that the science has been quietly building out for a decade. The water itself — what is dissolved in it, what leaches into it, and what the government does or does not require anyone to remove for the public good — may be doing more to the American metabolism than we have been willing to look at. No, let me say that differently: …that we have been ALLOWED to look at. Because to look at it honestly would likely lead to public demand for strict regulations on the water Americans are told is safe to drink.

The chemicals that rewrite your metabolism

Researchers call them obesogens. The term describes a class of endocrine-disrupting chemicals that interfere with the body’s hormonal regulation of fat, appetite, and metabolism — chemicals that can, in effect, reset the body’s instructions for how much to store and how much to burn. A growing body (no pun intended) of animal and epidemiological research links these compounds to weight gain, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome. They work by hijacking the receptors that govern how fat cells form and how the body processes sugar and lipids. Some appear to alter the gut microbiome and the hormonal signals that tell you when you are full.

And your American tap water is likely full of them.

Drinking water is one of the primary ways these chemicals enter the human body. The most notorious are PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the so-called “forever chemicals” engineered never to break down. They coat nonstick pans and waterproof jackets and firefighting foam, and they have leached into water supplies across the United States. The research on them is sobering: PFAS exposure is associated with disrupted lipid profiles, thyroid interference, and increased body fat, with the effects hitting hardest during pregnancy and early childhood, the windows when a body is writing its metabolic rulebook. They are detectable in the blood of nearly every American.

PFAS are one family among many. Bisphenol A, the BPA of “BPA-free” marketing fame, promotes the formation of fat cells and scrambles glucose metabolism. Phthalates, which soften plastics, carry anti-androgenic effects linked in human studies to larger waistlines. Atrazine, one of the most common agricultural herbicides in the United States, turns up routinely in water supplies downstream of farm country. Each of these is an obesogen. Each of these is, in many parts of America, in the water.

The field is young, and I will not overstate it. The scientists doing this work are careful to say that understanding the role of environmental obesogens in the obesity epidemic is, in their own words, still at an early stage. What they will say with confidence is that these chemicals are biologically active in the human metabolic system, that Americans are chronically exposed through their water far more than Europeans, and that the exposure is not evenly distributed — it tracks with geography, with poverty, with proximity to industry and agriculture.

The bottled-water escape hatch that isn’t

Most Americans I know reach for the same solution: they stop drinking the tap and buy bottled. It feels like control. It is closer to a lateral move. We have been taught through advertising to trust companies with logos and nice packaging.

A great deal of American bottled water begins as municipal tap water, filtered and rebranded, carrying whatever the source carried. Worse, in January 2024 a research team from Columbia and Rutgers published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that should have changed how the country drinks. Using a new laser-imaging technique, they counted the plastic in three popular bottled-water brands sold in the U.S. and found an average of roughly 240,000 plastic particles per liter — ten to a hundred times more than earlier estimates. About ninety percent were nanoplastics, particles so small they can slip through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream, lodging in organs. The researchers traced much of that plastic to the bottle itself and to the reverse-osmosis filter used to purify the water.

Let’s say that again, louder, for everyone at the bubbler in the back of the room: The filtration meant to make the bottled water clean was shedding plastic into it. One of the study’s own co-authors told reporters he switched to tap.

Nanoplastics are endocrine-active, and likely obseogens. They carry and concentrate other pollutants. And Americans are swallowing them by the hundred thousand — that is established. The bottle is not the exit.

It may be the trap within the trap.

What Madrid actually has

So why is the water different here? The lazy answer, popular in certain corners of the American wellness internet, is fluoride. Madrid’s tap water runs very low in fluoride — below 0.1 parts per million, against the 0.7 the United States adds to fluoridated systems. From there it is a short hop to the claim that fluoride is the secret culprit fattening, sickening, (or, if you’re Alex Jones, “making gay”), America.

I chased that claim hard, because it is seductive and it would make a cleaner headline than the one I chose. It does not hold. The studies linking fluoride to metabolic and gut-microbiome damage are run almost entirely at higher doses — the levels found in regions with naturally contaminated groundwater, far above what American utilities add. The reviews themselves conclude that fluoride’s long-term metabolic effects remain unclear. And the tidy “Europe rejected fluoride” story collapses on contact: European countries mostly declined water fluoridation over questions of consent and delivery method, not evidence of harm, and Spain itself runs fluoridation programs and permits fluoridated salt. Fluoride is the distraction. Chase it and you miss the real story standing behind it. That might be by design, so the real culprits can scapegoat flouride and remain unregulated.

What Madrid actually has is not magic water. It is a regulatory culture that treats water as a commons worth defending — a public utility, continuous monitoring, a European legal framework that sets hard limits and enforces them. It also has a population that consequently trusts what comes out of the pipes. The difference between American and Spanish tap water is, at bottom, the difference between two political choices about whether the state exists to protect people from the chemistry of modern industry, or to protect industry from the cost of cleaning up.

Which brings me to the part of this story that made me angry enough to write it. And extremely glad I left the states behind forever.

The rules are the thing keeping the chemistry out. America is dismantling them with alarming rapidity. Almost no one knows this. Almost no one cares.

In April 2024, after decades of delay, the Biden EPA did something unprecedented: it set the first legally enforceable national limits on six PFAS compounds in drinking water. It was a genuine public-health milestone, the kind of slow, unglamorous regulatory work that saves lives no one will ever be able to name, because the illness simply never happens.

Industry sued. Chemical manufacturers and water-utility trade groups went to court arguing the EPA had overstepped. And in 2025, the Trump administration’s EPA, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, gave them what they wanted. In May, the agency announced it would delay compliance with the limits on the two most-studied compounds, PFOA and PFOS, from 2029 to 2031, and rescind the limits on the other four entirely. In September, the EPA went to federal court with a motion to eliminate those four standards for good.

More than 73 million Americans are served by water systems that have detected PFAS above the limits the EPA now wants to erase. And in the same stretch, the administration proposed gutting the main federal fund that would have helped water systems afford the upgrades to comply — pulling the requirement and the money to meet it in a single motion. There is a word for removing the rule and defunding the fix at once. The word is capitulation, and the environmental lawyers who used to work at that agency used harsher ones.

The irony is almost too neat to print: Zeldin, as a congressman, voted for the PFAS Action Act in 2021. The forever chemicals did not change between his vote and his rollback. The pressure did.

The same story, wearing a different agency’s uniform

Water is one front. Walk down the hall to the food supply and the pattern repeats, because it is the same pattern.

On April 1, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., eliminated roughly 10,000 jobs — around 3,500 at the FDA and 2,400 at the CDC, on top of earlier firings of probationary staff. The administration insisted frontline inspectors were spared. Reporting told a more complicated story: the cuts fell on the toxicologists, microbiologists, and veterinarians who back inspectors up, on the entire Division of Food Processing Science and Technology, on a CDC lead-poisoning prevention branch, and — as internal emails revealed — on a food-testing lab quality-control program that was simply suspended. The FDA’s own deputy commissioner for human foods, Jim Jones, resigned, calling the firing of eighty-nine of his staff, in his words, beyond short-sighted. A former FDA commissioner wrote that the agency as the country had known it was finished.

The mechanism here is quieter than a headline layoff, and more corrosive. You can leave every inspector employed and still cripple inspection by firing the people who booked their travel, ran their labs, and processed their findings — which is roughly what happened. Inspectors began canceling trips. The Government Accountability Office had already warned, in January 2025, that the FDA was failing to keep pace with the inspections Congress required. The rot, in fairness, started earlier: the FDA had cut funding for state-level inspections under the previous administration, and states conduct most food inspections. The new administration did not invent the erosion. It poured accelerant on it, then cut the water line.

And the outbreaks came, and kept coming. In 2025 the FDA investigated more than thirty foodborne-illness outbreaks. A listeria outbreak tied to prepared pasta meals sold at Walmart, Kroger, and Trader Joe’s became one of the deadliest such events in years, with at least six deaths and a stillbirth. A consumer-advocacy analysis counted twenty-eight outbreaks in 2025 alone, tied to more than a thousand reported illnesses — and the CDC estimates that for every confirmed salmonella case, twenty-nine more go uncounted.

Then came the summer of 2026, and it got worse. Cyclospora — a parasite spread through food and water fouled with feces — exploded into the largest surge on record. By the CDC’s August 3 count, an estimated 18,000 Americans across 45 states had fallen ill since May, against a typical year that rarely clears 4,000; the agency had logged 6,707 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases with thousands more under review, and more than 400 people hospitalized. By the same point in 2025 the count stood at 249. Contaminated iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico and served, among other places, at Taco Bell drove the largest cluster. And cyclospora, which almost never kills in the United States, has now been tied to at least two deaths in this outbreak — both in Michigan, both in people with serious underlying conditions — a fact that reads as a statistical footnote until it is your mother in the hospital.

You cannot strip the surveillance, laboratory, and inspection capacity that catches contamination before it reaches the refrigerated aisle and expect the catching to keep pace — and the government did exactly that, precisely as the outbreaks were rising. Degrade the system that prevents the harm, and you do not have to intend the harm for the harm to arrive on schedule.

They knew this would happen.

They did not care.

They still don’t.

Because not caring about the public is profitable for corporations, and regulating things like food and water is expensive.

Your life is worthless to them.

What regulation actually buys

There is a sociopathic ideology, ascendant — perhaps dominant — in Washington, that treats every regulation as a cost and every rollback as a liberation. It measures the burden on the manufacturer and never the burden on the body — the PFAS in the blood, the plastic in the organ, the listeria in the lung, the slow metabolic drift that shows up years later as a number on a scale and a diagnosis in a chart. The cost did not vanish when the rule was rescinded. It moved. It moved from the corporation’s balance sheet to your endocrine system.

The body is not fooled by deregulation. The gut biome does not read press releases. Your hormones do not care which trade association won which lawsuit. They register only what actually enters the water and the food, and they respond in the currency they have — inflammation, dysregulation, weight, illness. Death.

The deregulation cabal is not going to change how they do business. Because they are governed by sociopath and narcissism, they will, instead, shift the blame to somewhere else, someone or something other than themselves, that they can then convince you they are protecting you from. Most recently, we see news stories spawned from government press releases popping up about how municipal water systems in the United States are “under cyberattack” from Iran. Convenient. Not only does this administration get an endless war with Iran that will make the members of the administration and all their defense contractor friends rich around the world, they also get a boogeyman to blame on all the issues at home caused by their own wanton deregulation of your food and water. They can kill you, and blame someone else. They can turn that someone else into the ultimate enemy, so your children join the army to avenge your death.

Let’s be clear: Madrid did not become a city of thin people who trust their tap water by accident, and it will not stay one by accident. It made a choice, and keeps making it, to treat clean water and safe food as things a government owes its people rather than favors it grants to whoever lobbies hardest. Standing in my kitchen with a glass of Sierra water, I have come to understand that trust in your country as a form of quiet wealth — the luxury of not having to think about what you are drinking.

America had that luxury once. It is being deregulated away, one rescinded standard at a time, and the bill is coming due in the one ledger no lobbyist can revise: the human body. Your human body. Your spouse’s body. Your children’s bodies. Ask yourself who profited from the rule that got erased. Then ask who pays. The answer to the second question is looking back at you from the bathroom mirror, and from the bathroom scale, and from the emergency room.

If this makes you angry, good. It should. It needs to change. But the only way it will change is by remembering that every one of these rules was written by people — which means it can be rewritten by people, and the rewriting has always come from below, from the ones who pay the bill and finally refuse to keep paying it. The PFAS limits exist at all because citizens forced a slow, reluctant government to act. They are being erased because industry lobbied harder than the rest of us pushed. So push. Vote as if your metabolism depends on it, because it does. Call the representative whose name is on the budget that funds the inspectors, and be specific. Show up in the rulemaking on the very standards being gutted. Back the career scientists being driven out, and the states writing tougher limits while Washington retreats. Madrid is not thin and unafraid of its tap by luck or virtue or good genes; it is that way because enough people, for long enough, decided that clean water and safe food were a floor beneath which no one falls, rather than a luxury auctioned to the highest bidder. That decision is still ours to make. The body — the human one and the civic one — is built to heal the moment you stop poisoning it. So let us stop.

A note before you come at me in the comments about ‘fat shaming’...

I am obese. I write this from inside the subject rather than above it, and I have carried this body and its consequences long enough to refuse two lies about it at once.

The first lie is that obesity is harmless, and that saying otherwise is an act of cruelty. The medical record is not ambiguous. More than 40 percent of American adults are now obese, and the condition is causally tangled with type 2 diabetes — obesity drives an estimated 85 to 90 percent of cases — along with heart disease, stroke, hypertension, sleep apnea, kidney disease, and a long list of cancers, at a direct medical cost the CDC puts near $173 billion a year and a toll counted in hundreds of thousands of early graves. Loving people who are fat, and being one, means telling them the truth rather than sedating them with a comfortable version of it.

The second lie is the one this article is really about: that a fat body is a moral verdict, a sign of laziness or lesser worth. That is garbage. I believe overweight and obese people are neither weak nor inferior nor to blame for an epidemic engineered around them by industries that profit from making them sick. My argument runs the other way — that much of what is dissolved in the American food and water supply is doing this to bodies, mine included, and that the people responsible would very much like you to keep believing it is a personal failing so that you never look up at them.

Which brings me to the comment I can already see coming. Someone is typing the words “fat-shaming” right now. Before you send it, sit with a question: who benefits when every honest conversation about diet, weight, and metabolic health gets detonated into an identity loyalty test, when the price of naming a public-health catastrophe is being branded a bigot?

I am convinced the answer is the same interests polluting your water and engineering your food. The tobacco industry, the sugar industry, and the chemical giants have spent decades funding doubt, front groups, and division to delay the rules that would cost them money — that history is documented, not speculative. The online purity tests that punish anyone for discussing weight honestly serve that same project, whether those interests seed the outrage or merely feed on the outrage that is already there. Either way the result is identical: millions of people who should be furious at a boardroom instead turn and fight one another in the comments, while the polluters bank the quarter and draft the next rollback.

I cannot stop anyone from getting angry, and I would not want to — anger is the correct response to this story. I ask only that you aim it at the target that earned it, and that before you fire off a word in defense of the machine making us sick, you think long and hard about what, and whom, you are actually defending.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a Tip