The couple argued, according to hotel staff and were separated. Despite confirming Ashly Robinson died by suicide, police said they are still investigating her death.

What to know:

• Tanzanian authorities are investigating the death of U.S. influencer Ashly Robinson in Zanzibar and have ordered her fiancé, crypto investor Joe McCann, to remain in the country while the case is reviewed.
• Police say Robinson, 31, died by suicide after a heated dispute with McCann at the Zuri Zanzibar resort, but her family disputes that conclusion and has launched a GoFundMe campaign to cover related expenses.
• McCann, a prominent crypto hedge fund manager whose Asymmetric Liquid Alpha Fund was recently shut down after steep reported losses, has had his passport withheld as police await forensic autopsy results.

Joe McCann, founder of crypto investment firm Asymmetric, is being probed by authorities in Tanzania, following the alleged death by suicide of his fiancée, U.S. influencer Ashly Robinson, during a trip to Zanzibar.

Robinson, 31, a Miami-based lifestyle creator also known as Ashlee Jenae, was found unresponsive on April 9 in a private villa at luxury resort Zuri Zanzibar, where the couple had been celebrating her birthday and recent engagement. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

According to an NBC News report, Zanzibar police investigating the death of Robinson confirmed she died by suicide following a “misunderstanding” between the couple.

Police confirmed the couple had been involved in a heated dispute before being separated twice by hotel staff and sent to separate rooms. However, police said Robinson’s death is still being investigated and have therefore withheld McCann’s passport, according to the news outlet.

Police have questioned McCann and have asked him to remain in the country while they receive the forensic results from Ashly’s autopsy.

The hotel said it was “deeply saddened” by what happened. “Our sincerest thoughts and sympathies go out to the family and loved ones during this painful time. We are providing our full cooperation to the local authorities and the U.S. Embassy,” the hotel said in a statement.

Robinson’s family, who said they doubt she died by suicide, have set up a GoFundMe page seeking to raise $50,000 to help with travel costs, arrangements and other unexpected expenses, they said. They have raised more than their target.

McCann, with an estimated net worth of $45 million, is a prominent figure in institutional crypto, leading Asymmetric, a hedge fund and venture firm backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon.

However, in December, he announced he would shut down Asymmetric’s Liquid Alpha Fund following claims of massive financial losses throughout 2025. McCann’s decision to wind down the fund followed unconfirmed social media chatter that the liquid fund was down 78% this year.

Robinson and her fiancé, McCann, traveled to Zanzibar on April 4, according to a translated video statement from Tanzanian police.

CoinDesk called Zanzibar police several times, but the staff answering the phones immediately hung up, refusing to answer any questions. The Tanzania Police Force has also not responded to an email request for information.

The U.S. State Department said it had no further comment, only offering its condolences to the Robinson family.

“The Trump Administration has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans,” a State Department spokesperson said.

“Due to privacy and other considerations, we have no further comment. For additional questions about any investigation, we refer you to local authorities. We offer our sincerest condolences to the family of Ms. Robinson and her loved ones on their loss.”

The post Crypto fund manager probed in the suspicious death of his fiancée in Zanzibar appeared first on Activist Post.

Bint Jbail, South Lebanon – Israel has announced its intent to militarily occupy South Lebanon with its eyes set on the symbolic town of Bint Jbail. In preparation for this land theft, the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah have put up a stiff resistance and managed to inflict a large number of casualties amongst enemy soldiers.

During the last large-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanese territory in 2006, its armed forces had managed to reach the Litani River area, some 32 kilometers from the border within thirty days. In over 40 days of fighting, this time around, they have largely failed to move much further than a few kilometers deep into South Lebanon.

Desperate to make an impact and inflict a psychological blow upon the population of Lebanon and break Hezbollah’s morale, Israel has chosen to cover its failure to advance deep into the country by assaulting the village of Bint Jbeil instead.

The village’s significance dates back to the year 2000, when the former Secretary General of Hezbollah, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, delivered what was perhaps his most historic speech from a small soccer stadium there to address the Lebanese nation on May 26 of that year to mark the liberation of the South, which had been under Israeli occupation for nearly a decade.

Seyed Nasrallah declared the following:

“Israel, with its nuclear weapons and most advanced warplanes in the region, I swear by God, is actually weaker than a spider’s web… Israeli society lacks the resilience to endure a bloody conflict or suffer casualties. Israel may appear strong from the outside, but it’s easily destroyed and defeated.”

In 2006, Israel set it as an objective that they would conquer Bint Jbeil and set an Israeli flag at the site where Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah had delivered his speech, but failed to seize control of the village; due to the fierce resistance it faced from Hezbollah’s fighters. The “spiders web theory”, about Israel’s weakness, has long occupied the minds of Israel’s top military officials, who continuously attempt to dispute the statement.

Former Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would later visit Bint Jbeil as part of his 2010 trip to Lebanon. From that very same stadium where Nasrallah once spoke, Ahmadinejad delivered a speech in which he asserted that:

“Occupied Palestine will be liberated from the filth of occupation by the strength of resistance and through the faith of the resistance,” drawing outrage from the Israeli political leadership.”

However, today the Israeli military quickly claimed to have completely encircled Bint Jbeil, while some media outlets have disseminated maps showing what is purported to be the situation on the ground.

Yet, the concept of Israel totally capturing areas in Lebanon is misleading for a number of reasons.

During the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war, Israeli Brigadier General Gal Hirsch had declared publicly that Israel had “complete control” over Bint Jbeil. This claim was later discredited after the evidence emerged to show that three separate pushes to seize the village had failed, despite a heavy Israeli presence surrounding it.

Similarly, we see a similar pattern this time around. Major announcements are made, regarding the Israeli advance and how they have the area surrounded. What this actually means is that Israel has cut off all the main public roads, but doesn’t indicate that Hezbollah supply routes are closed, nor does it mean that there aren’t Lebanese fighters operating in the territory Israel claims to have “captured”.

Another example of where this has been on full display is in the case of Khiam, a border village located in south-east Lebanon. Since 1977 the Israeli military has attempted to control the village area’s mountainous terrain, failing five times to do so. In its sixth attempt to seize the territory, it also announced that Khiam was surrounded and almost entirely under their control, yet Hezbollah fighters routinely carry out attacks on the positions they claim to have already occupied.

Hezbollah’s Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem commented, following Israel’s 2024 attempt to seize the village, that the reason Lebanese fighters had foiled the invading army’s plots was that it maintained a series of undetected supply lines.

Although Israel did not claim to have seized the village of Bint Jbeil in 2024, the “spiders web” speech was still very much on the minds of the Israeli media and its senior officials. Israel Hayom, a newspaper owned by Miriam Adelson and close to PM Benjamin Netanyahu, had even run an article in September of that year, entitled “Spider Web Theory Unravels”.

Believing that focusing its efforts on seizing Bint Jbeil, will demoralize Hezbollah and constitute a major victory, Israel recently launched airstrikes against the soccer stadium where the famous Nasrallah speech was issued.

The airstrikes against a small stadium were even addressed by Israel’s 98th Division Commander Guy Levy, who boasted that “Bint Jbeil 2000: Someone here spoke and boasted about webs and spiders..Today, that man no longer exists, the stadium is gone, and his words are worth nothing.”

In the realm of Israeli propaganda, this is presented as an achievement. Contrary to this point of view, the strategy of Hezbollah has always been to draw Israel’s forces deep into Lebanese territory, in order to ambush them and wage a guerilla war that eventually forces the occupying army to retreat.  Hence Nasrallah’s warning to Israel in July of 2024, that in the event Israel invades “you will have no tanks left”, after which he said that southern Lebanon would drown the Israeli army.

Washington-based pro-war think tank, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD) recently offered the following analysis as to why the IDF cannot achieve its stated military goals in southern Lebanon:

“Israel would have to occupy hostile, unpacified terrain over extended lines while simultaneously pushing north through south Lebanon, up the coast toward Dahiyeh, and along Lebanon’s northeastern border with Syria—all while remaining undermanned and over committed across other vital active fronts, and prepared for additional theaters to ignite. Air power alone cannot disarm Hezbollah. Israel’s sustained aerial campaign over the past 15 months hindered, but didn’t halt, Hezbollah’s comprehensive regeneration.”

Similarly, the strategy implemented by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza sought to achieve the exact same outcome. Israel typically sends its soldiers into areas it invades, in tanks and heavily armoured vehicles without infantry accompanying them, to reduce deaths. What this also means is that it does not fully clear areas it enters, nor does it ever fully control them. The difference between Gaza and Lebanon is that the Lebanese terrain is more difficult to traverse, and Hezbollah is far superior to Hamas as a military force.

Speaking to ABC news last August, Gabi Siboni, an Israeli colonel and military expert, working for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security think tank, stated that the war in the Gaza Strip could take a whole decade to complete its objectives.

With all the relevant facts considered, there is a low likelihood that Israeli ground forces will successfully achieve their objectives of preventing Hezbollah fire into the northern settlements and to permanently occupy southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, proving the “spiders web” theory of Hezbollah’s former leader, Mayors representing Israeli population centers along the border are frequently accusing their leadership of failing to protect residents and warning of an exodus from the area.

Watch my latest livestream: https://youtu.be/5qsiYyPQCeA?si=4ybJv8QdO04lCybE

The post The Battle for Bint Jbeil: Israel Revisits A Symbolic Defeat As Resistance Holds The Line appeared first on Activist Post.

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Visa has just unveiled a new suite of artificial intelligence tools designed to overhaul how credit card disputes are handled, and once again this is being presented as a simple evolution toward efficiency and improved customer experience, yet when you step back and examine the scale of what is unfolding, this is clearly part of a much broader structural shift within the financial system toward centralization and automation.

The numbers alone should make that obvious, with Visa processing over 106 million disputes globally in 2025, representing a 35% increase since 2019, and that type of exponential growth is not something that can be resolved through incremental improvements, it requires a complete restructuring of how the system functions, which is precisely what Visa is now implementing.

They are introducing six AI-driven tools split between merchants and financial institutions, designed to intercept disputes before they even occur, automate responses, and consolidate the entire process into a unified framework where decisions are guided by network-wide data rather than individual judgment, and once you move into that framework, the human element is steadily removed and replaced by algorithmic consistency.

Every transaction, dispute, and outcome begins to follow the same predictive logic, and that is where the real transformation begins. Once behavior is standardized across a global financial network, control naturally follows.

This is exactly the progression I have warned about for years when discussing the digitization of money, because people continue to look at these developments as isolated improvements rather than understanding that they are components of a much larger system, where transactions become digital, then tracked, then analyzed, and ultimately controlled, and Visa’s expansion into predictive dispute management clearly places the system into that analytical phase moving toward control.

The introduction of AI models removes discretion. Document analysis tools that auto-generate responses eliminate interpretation, and centralized platforms that unify workflows create a single point of oversight, all of which together form the infrastructure necessary for a fully automated financial system where decisions are no longer case-by-case but system-wide.

This ties directly into what I have said about central bank digital currencies, because the real objective behind these systems has never been convenience but visibility, as governments and institutions cannot regulate or control what they cannot see, and once all transactions are processed digitally within centralized frameworks, that visibility becomes absolute.

Visa itself is not a central bank, but it operates at the core of the global payments system, and what is being constructed here is the foundational infrastructure that governments will inevitably leverage as they move toward broader monetary control systems, since a CBDC cannot function without the ability to monitor, analyze, and influence transactions in real time, and this is precisely the type of system being built.

While this is being marketed as a way to simplify disputes or improve efficiency, the broader implication is that the financial system is being transformed into a closed-loop network where every transaction is monitored, analyzed, and ultimately governed by machine logic. This is not the final stage but rather a transition toward a system where control over capital becomes increasingly centralized as confidence in traditional structures continues to decline.

The post The Rise of AI in Payments Is Not About Convenience appeared first on Activist Post.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

One week after posting a profanity-laced Easter message threatening to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, Donald J. Trump, the 47^th president of the United States, spent the night of April 12 and into the early morning hours unleashing a barrage of AI-generated images, threats and insults.

One post depicted Trump as Jesus, imbued with divine power, healing the sick.

Another imagined a Trump-branded hotel on the Moon.

Yet another lashed out at Pope Leo XIV as weak on crime, suggesting he owed his papacy to Trump and “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

After significant outcry—including from his own evangelical and MAGA supporters—Trump deleted the post but refused to apologize for it.

Blasphemous. Profane. Threatening. Self-aggrandizing.

These posts are not anomalies.

They are part of a pattern—one that appears to be escalating.

What was once dismissed as erratic now feels increasingly unhinged. What was once provocative now borders on delusional. What was once ego now approaches outright megalomania.

Consider the trajectory.

In May 2025, after returning from the funeral of Pope Francis, Trump posted an AI generated image of himself as pope.

In December 2025, he posted more than 160 times over a five-hour period.

In January 2026, another late-night posting binge featured what the Poynter Institute described as “false economic claims, election conspiracies and political attacks.”

In February 2026, Trump shared a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes—while casting himself as the king of the jungle.

This is not normal.

Nor is it merely rhetorical excess.

It is behavior that mirrors the governing style: impulsive, self-serving, detached from reality, and increasingly dangerous.

The same egomania driving Trump’s online persona is shaping his presidency.

He has alienated allies, threatened the sovereignty of other nations—including Canada, Greenland and Cuba—and pushed the country toward ill-advised wars with devastating human and financial costs.

Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, he has overseen policies that have left average Americans struggling to stay afloat, even as his allies and corporate partners grow richer.

Whether driven by ego or manipulation—by flattery, spectacle or greed—the result is the same: America is being hollowed out while the president redecorates it in gold.

Literally.

Operating on the philosophy that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, Trump bulldozed the East Wing to construct a lavish ballroom. He has proposed monuments in his own honor, covered the White House in gold embellishments, affixed his name to national institutions, and floated renaming major landmarks after himself.

He is even staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn on his 80^th birthday as part of the nation’s 250^th anniversary celebrations.

All of this while Americans struggle with rising grocery costs, unaffordable healthcare, and economic instability driven by his reckless policy decisions.

This is not serious governance. This is spectacle.

This is not rational.

This is not presidential.

And yet, despite widespread fatigue, desensitization, and normalization of this behavior, there must come a point when we acknowledge what is plainly visible: something is deeply wrong with the president.

This is no longer a matter of partisan disagreement or political style.

To any objective viewer, Donald Trump’s behavior—which has always been erratic at best—has become increasingly unstable.

As the New York Times reports:

“Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact. He keeps saying that his father was born in Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx. He repeats an invented story about his uncle, an M.I.T. professor, telling him about teaching the terrorist known as the Unabomber. He wanders off into odd tangents — an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan, two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles.”

As the oldest person elected to the White House, Trump—who turns 80 this year—oscillates between vicious politicking, relentless self-idolatry, and serving as the sleight-of-hand prop for what increasingly resembles an organized crime operation—one that operates behind the floodlights to consolidate power and wealth while robbing the American electorate blind.

Trump’s self-mythologizing is unprecedented in modern American politics.

As journalist Peter Baker notes, Trump “regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.”

“His picture has been splashed all over the White House, on multistory banners on the side of federal buildings, on annual passes to national parks and maybe even soon on a one-dollar coin. His name has been etched on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, on the U.S. Institute of Peace, on federal investment accounts, special visas and a discount drug program and, if he has his way, on Washington Dulles International Airport, Penn Station in New York and the future stadium of the Washington Commanders.”

Baker’s catalogue of Trump’s efforts to brand himself as the face of a new America is expansive, ranging from a 15-foot-tall gold-covered “Don Colossus” statue to a new class of battleships and adding his face to Mt. Rushmore. Trump even toyed with the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Trump.

This is not branding.

It is the architecture of a cult of personality.

“This is a man drunk on power with an already enormous ego,” said Sarah Matthews, deputy White House press secretary during the first Trump administration. “It reinforces the perception that this presidency is more about elevating one man than serving the country.”

As always, history points the way.

Cults of personality are hallmarks of authoritarian regimes—not constitutional republics. They are associated with figures like Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and, more recently, Vladimir Putin.

The parallels are difficult to ignore.

So, too, are Trump’s similarities to the megalomania of Saparmurat Niyazov, the former dictator of Turkmenistan, whose own cult of personality gave rise to policies based on his changeable whims, pet peeves and ego.

As Slate reports, Niyazov not only outlawed beards, lip syncing, and gold teeth but also installed a 350 foot, rocket-shaped monument­—the Arch of Neutrality—topped with a golden statue of Niyazov that rotated so it constantly faced the sun.

But such power does not exist in a vacuum.

It is enabled.

While Niyazov was, indeed, a megalomaniac, it was his cult of personality—the hard-core followers who formed his base—that empowered him to act as a dictator.

Likewise, Trump’s personality cult has, as the New York Times Editorial Board noted, “transformed the Republican Party from a political organization into a cult of personality”—one that reinforces and amplifies his excesses.

We are, as Pope Leo XIV warned, mired in a “delusion of omnipotence” that “is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”

Which brings us to the unavoidable question: what happens when the president appears unable to discharge the duties of his office in a rational, coherent, and responsible manner?

In other words, what can we do when the president appears to be losing his mind?

This is a constitutional crisis.

And the Constitution provides a remedy.

The 25^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1967 in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, provides a process by which the government continues to function should the president be unable to carry out his duties.

There are four clauses to the amendment, which outlines the procedure for “replacing the president or vice president in the event of death, removal, resignation, or incapacitation.”

Section 4 is explicit:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

A growing chorus of individuals—a lineup of the usual Trump critics, as well as some of his onetime defenders—have loudly called to invoke the 25^th Amendment, insisting that the president is not fit for office.

Yet as Gaby Hinsliff concludes in The Guardian:

“In practice, constitutional safeguards are only as strong as the resolve of a leader’s inner circle—people often devoted to keeping them in power at all costs—to expose the boss publicly at his or her most vulnerable… But it’s precisely to override such emotional dilemmas that, in the case of political leaders, constitutional safeguards exist. For without them, we’re all potentially just passengers in some superpower’s speeding truck: watching helplessly from the back seat as the driver weaves all over the road, and wondering just how close we have to get to crashing before someone speaks up.”

Notably silent among those calling to invoke the 25^th Amendment: anyone in Trump’s cabinet or among those who would benefit most from keeping Trump as a figurehead, including the Republicans in Congress (minus Thomas Massie).

History suggests this is not unusual.

There has long been a tendency to shield those in power from scrutiny, to conceal frailty in the name of stability, and to protect the office even at the expense of the public.

That instinct—to cover up rather than confront—can be as dangerous as the instability itself.

This was never supposed to be about politics.

It was never supposed to be about ideology.

It is about constitutional capability.

Yet the same voices that once called for invoking the 25th Amendment against Joe Biden have fallen silent—or worse, attempted to dismiss Trump’s instability as authentic and refreshingly unfiltered.

But there is no filter for this level of dysfunction.

Somewhere between Trump’s attempts to overthrow the 2020 election and his threats of war crimes against civilians, we crossed a line—from controversial leadership into dangerous incapacity.

“What’s alarming is how the rate of Trump’s bizarre speech and political decisions have been increasing,” said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the Psychology Department at Cornell University and in the Psychiatry Department at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Trump has shown evidence of dementia … as indicated by his strange gait, phonemic paraphasia—when he begins a word and can’t finish it—and decline in the complexity of his words and concepts… he is avoiding events where he has to respond coherently and spontaneously … he has become more impulsive, another sign of incipient dementia.”

Even those within Trump’s orbit have acknowledged the risk.

As former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci observed, “It was at this point that our Founders thought the best thing to do would be to remove a mad man who has the executive office. It became more formalized with the 25th amendment, but more people now should be calling for this man’s removal.”

Yet again, the troubling parallels to America’s nascent beginnings are hard to ignore.

King George III—believed to have suffered from severe mental instability, including manic episodes and delusions—lost the American colonies in part because of his inability to govern rationally.

Two hundred fifty years later, America once again finds itself charting dangerous territory.

Yet even so, this moment is about so much more than one man and his cult of personality.

Because while the president may be unraveling in plain sight, the machinery of the American Police State continues to expand—quietly, relentlessly, and with bipartisan support.

Surveillance is expanding.

Policing is becoming more militarized.

Power is becoming more centralized and less accountable.

And unlike the presidency, there is no 25th Amendment for the police state.

No mechanism to declare it unfit.

No procedure to remove it.

Or is there?

After all, isn’t that what the Declaration of Independence was—a formal recognition that a ruler was no longer fit to govern, followed by a blueprint for replacing that power with something accountable to the people?

The American Revolution was, at its core, a judgment: that unchecked power must be resisted.

That principle still stands.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the answer is not violence, but vigilance.

Not chaos, but constitutional resistance.

If the government has become unfit—whether through madness, corruption or unchecked power—then it is up to “we the people” to hold it accountable.

Because if we fail to act, we may soon find that the problem is no longer one unstable leader—but a system that no longer answers to the people at all.

WC: 2187

The post Unfit to Govern: We Need a 25th Amendment for the American Police State appeared first on Activist Post.

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

JD Vance claimed that more aid is entering Gaza now than at any point in the last five years. The public documentary record from the UN and frontline humanitarian agencies, as reflected in the updates of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for the occupied Palestinian territory) points in the opposite direction. JD Vance said Gaza aid is better than ever. The record says otherwise.

The record clearly says otherwise, and taken together, the documents we are providing today show a shrinking flow of humanitarian cargo, collapsing health and food systems, and a ceasefire that is failing on its own terms rather than delivering a surge in relief.

VIDEO: Clip from Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event “This Is the Turning Point Tour,” Akins Ford Arena at the Classic Center, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, April 14, 2026. (Source: Caught On The Hill  | Drope Site) 

Vice President JD Vance — complicit in the deliberate restriction of essential food, shelter, and medicine to 2 million Palestinian civilians, including a million children— falsely claimed yesterday that more aid is entering Gaza now than at any point in the last five years.… https://t.co/fZJtHnVNVS pic.twitter.com/ibUUlXIqum

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) April 16, 2026

The Trump administration is not a bystander to Gaza’s starvation campaign; it is its political guarantor, and Vance is one of the slickest salesmen for the siege. Once Washington helps seal the crossings, arm the enforcers and whitewash the hunger, complicity no longer fits because this is cover for engineered starvation.

OCHA shows the trend

The first test for Vance’s claim is simple. Has humanitarian access to Gaza actually improved over recent months, or has it deteriorated? OCHA April 20026 situation reports give a clear answer. In early 2026, UN‑tracked humanitarian cargo entering Gaza did not rise to record levels. It declined from January to February and declined again in March, while the reach of food assistance also dropped after January.

Earlier in the ceasefire period, the picture was different. At the end of January, OCHA reported a stronger week in which large volumes of pallets were offloaded and collected through both Kerem Shalom and Zikim, with both crossings functioning for aid.

Another January update noted that in the first three months after the ceasefire, Gaza received roughly 54,000 metric tons of aid a month, about three times the average monthly volume during the seventy‑eight‑day blockade that preceded it, underlining that even the “good weeks” were only a rebound from near‑total closure, not a five‑year high.

When the regional escalation began at the end of February, that fragile improvement quickly reversed. In March 2026, OCHA reported that only 3,424 pallets of UN and partner aid were offloaded between 27 February and 5 March, a sharp drop that shows just how thin the pipeline became once restrictions tightened again.

Later reports (April 2026) describe a narrowing corridor. By March, Kerem Shalom was left as the only cargo crossing consistently available for humanitarian agencies, and OCHA noted that the closure of other routes was limiting the volume of aid that could enter the strip.

Based on the 2 April 2026 situation report on ReliefWeb, across the period from October 2025 to the end of March 2026, OCHA counted roughly 380,000 pallets of humanitarian cargo collected in Gaza and stressed that less than one per cent of UN‑tracked consignments were intercepted or looted in transit.

The pattern is unmistakable. Within the ceasefire period itself, access did not steadily improve. It moved from a relatively better January, with multiple crossings operating and volumes recovering from a total blockade, to a tighter system in March and April that relied largely on a single gate.

Against that background, the idea that Gaza is experiencing the best aid access of the past five years (‘thanks to the US’) reads less like optimism and more like a denial of the UN’s own reporting.

WHO shows what that trend does to bodies

OCHA’s graphs become real when you look at the World Health Organization (WHO) description of Gaza’s health system. In its 4 March flash update, WHO says that almost half of essential medicines and around two-thirds of medical consumables in Gaza were already completely out of stock. At the same time, the WHO reports that hundreds of pallets of lifesaving medical supplies were waiting outside Gaza or stuck at the crossing, approved on paper but not yet available to the hospitals that needed them.

WHO also records a halt in fuel entry to Gaza at the end of February, just as health facilities, which rely almost entirely on fuel for electricity, were trying to maintain basic services, as the same 4 March 2026 WHO flash update makes clear. It notes that fuel had to be rationed from existing stocks to keep critical functions running.

A later OCHA update released on April 10 confirms that some diesel entered in early April but describes continued constraints and stop‑start deliveries, underscoring that fuel access is episodic and politically controlled, not steadily improving. On top of this, medical evacuations through Rafah and Kerem Shalom were suspended, despite tens of thousands of patients needing treatment that simply does not exist inside Gaza, from advanced surgery to cancer care. OCHA’s April reporting adds that a brief evacuation on 5 April moved just 17 patients and 33 caregivers through Rafah, before WHO suspended its support to medical evacuations again on 6 April after a contractor providing services to the organisation in Gaza was killed.

These are not abstract supply‑chain issues, as they translate into postponed operations, equipment failures, and patients turned away because there is nothing left to give them. When a politician then tells the public that aid is flowing better than ever, he is not just getting the trend wrong. He is smoothing over a documented reality in which people are being denied medicines and evacuations that could keep them alive.

WFP shows how hunger is engineered

The same logic appears in food. In March, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned that it had been unable to bring new food supplies into Gaza for weeks because the crossings were closed to both humanitarian and commercial cargo.

Inside Gaza, only a limited amount of food remained, while a far larger quantity of WFP food was positioned outside the strip, ready to move if the authorities allowed it in. This was clearly articulated and described in the WFP story “Risk of famine across all of Gaza, May 2025 report. That gap between available food and blocked entry is the core of the story. Families in Gaza were cutting rations and facing soaring prices, not because the world had run out of food, but because the system controlling the borders was preventing it from reaching them.

WFP’s market observations describe exactly what you would expect in that situation, with the cost of basic staples spiking and ordinary people forced to spend far more for far less, as described in the WFP Palestine Food Security Analysis – Market Monitor, March 2026. A concurrent OCHA update issued in April adds that damage to the electricity line supplying southern desalination sharply reduced drinking water for about 500,000 people, while cooking gas shortages forced nearly half of Gaza’s population to burn waste for cooking, a measure of how far basic living conditions have regressed. A follow‑up situation report released by the World Food Programme in early April described the same pattern of obstacles and shortages, showing that the late‑March crisis was not a brief anomaly but an ongoing restriction regime.

Anera, the American Near East Refugee Aid field reporting, brings the same reality down to a more granular level. Its March 2026 situation report describes Kerem Shalom as the only goods crossing and says it is still not operating at the scale required to meet needs.

In an April infographic, Anera summarises its work since October 2023, listing large cumulative totals for meals, water, and consultations, but it also shows only nine trucks in the pipeline at that moment, a revealing snapshot of how thin the near‑term lifeline really is.

A system that leaves food and supplies waiting outside Gaza while the price of flour and gas explodes inside is not a system that can credibly be described as delivering unprecedented relief. It is a system that manufactures scarcity, then asks the world to believe that scarcity is somehow a sign of progress.

The scorecard delivers the verdict

To understand how all these threads fit together, it helps to look at the joint humanitarian scorecard compiled by major aid groups such as Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Oxfam, Save the Children, Refugees International (RI) and Danish Refugee Council (DRC). Rather than applying an external ideological test, it measures the ceasefire against its own written promises, including minimum aid levels, restored basic services, and improved movement (as set out in the report.

DOCUMENT: Humanitarian Scorecard – Six Months in, Gaza Ceasefire is Failing” (Source: Save the Children’s Resource Centre)

The result is a failing overall score and a zero for humanitarian access, after examining months of performance since the ceasefire took effect.

The scorecard notes that the supposed minimum standard of hundreds of humanitarian trucks a day has not been met, and that commercial entries, while sometimes rising, are not a substitute for monitored relief, a dynamic emphasised in the UN posting of the report on the UN Question of Palestine website. It also stresses that key crossings remain closed or heavily restricted, leaving Kerem Shalom as the single inconsistent entry point for most cargo.

In describing looting and diversion, it concludes that only a tiny fraction of aid has been intercepted, undermining claims that chaos inside Gaza is the main reason supplies fail to reach people (as reflected in the ReliefWeb mirror “Humanitarian Scorecard – Six Months in, Gaza Ceasefire is Failing” at ReliefWeb).

UN reporting echoes this, stating that less than one percent of UN‑tracked aid has been intercepted or looted during the ceasefire period, reinforcing the point that the main brake on relief is policy, not theft (see OCHA’s Gaza Humanitarian Response Situation Report No. 66).

What this document provides is not fresh outrage, but an audit. It connects the shrinking cargo volumes that OCHA records, the medical collapse that WHO describes, and the hunger that WFP warns about, and it asks whether the ceasefire is delivering what it promised. It answers that it is not.

Once that conclusion is on the table, it becomes much harder to treat any glowing description of the situation as a simple error or a difference of opinion. It starts to look like a deliberate refusal to acknowledge an evidence‑based verdict.

When words erase suffering

All of this leads back to Vance’s statement. This is not about his personality, but truly about what happens when a senior official describes a besieged population as if it were finally being relieved, precisely while the most authoritative reports show the opposite.

Nor did the ceasefire bring normality. OCHA reported on 10 April that airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire were continuing across Gaza and that 736 Palestinians had been killed since the ceasefire was announced in October 2025, while the UN human rights office said six months on that Palestinians across Gaza remained unsafe as Israeli attacks continued. At this stage, we must assume that the effect is not merely to misinform, but to dull public sensitivity to deprivation that has already been measured and recorded in painstaking detail.

What makes JD Vance’s remarks so repellent is not only that they are false. It is that they cheapen the suffering of people trapped inside a catastrophe that has been documented again and again by doctors, aid workers, and the very institutions tasked with tracking hunger, collapse, and death.

To look at that record and still suggest things are getting better is not a harmless political exaggeration. It is moral cowardice.

There is something especially rotten about using power and distance to talk over the pain of people who have neither. Undermining someone else’s suffering is among the lowest forms of dishonesty. It reveals not just indifference, but a serious failure of integrity, and a willingness to treat human misery as a communications shield.

If Vance does not know the facts, that is ignorance of a shocking kind for a man in his position. If he does know them and says this anyway, that is worse. In either case, the result is the same. The truth is buried, the public is misled, and the suffering of Palestinians is made easier to dismiss.

The people of Gaza are not living inside a talking point. They are living inside the realities described in these documents, where crossings close, medicines run out, food is held at the border, and promises on paper dissolve at the first test. For health, that now includes not only WHO but also Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), whose staff describe critical shortages of supplies across Gaza’s hospitals, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which warns of famine risks for children across the strip.

That is why claims like Vance’s cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged, because the record exists. The numbers are already written, and pretending otherwise is not just bad politics; it is an erasure of lives that are already hanging by a thread.

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In a diagnosis, which was confirmed on April 10th, Arkansas reported its largest bird flu outbreak of the year. As war has gripped the world, the bird flu issue has been relegated to the bottom of Google searches; however, it is still a concern for farmers and consumers.

Around 191,200 birds were part of the affected flock at the Clay County farm.

First Human Bird Flu Case In 9 Months: Person Was Infected With A New Strain

According to the Arkansas Department of Agriculture (ADA), the farm was placed under quarantine, and containment measures were underway. While officials didn’t say what happened to the affected commercial poultry flock, its website said depopulation is “the only effective control method.”

Dr. Meryl Nass: Culling Poultry in Response to Bird Flu is a Failed Strategy and Should Cease

“Poultry growers in the region are urged to stay alert for signs of [Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPAI] and continue following strict biosecurity practices to protect their flocks,” ADA said.

The avian influenza is still a problem, as war wages all around the globe. Rising fuel prices, coupled with inflation, are staring American consumers in the face, causing them to forget about issues that could linger long after a peace deal is reached.

USDA said over 1.5 million birds have been affected by bird flu in the past 30 days, and that spring is a peak season as migrations take place.

“Detections are higher in the fall and spring, because we continue to see wild birds spreading the virus as they migrate to their seasonal homes. [Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service] continues to work closely with state animal health officials on surveillance efforts to look for the virus in commercial, backyard, and wild birds,” USDA said, according to THV11. 

The dominant H5N1 strain looks be sticking around, and will likely become endemic.

Starting in 2024, severe infections from avian influenza were reported in North America. Every severe case was caused by this newly dominant D1.1 strain, though at the time, the disparate geographical locations of those cases made the source of the infections unclear, according to PR Newswire. 

A Biosecure Facility in Texas is Creating Bird Flu Vaccines For Humans

Vaccines could be readily available in the near future, as Kansas State University works on one for chickens. The research team at the College of Veterinary Medicine previously developed a vaccine designed to guard cattle against bovine parainfluenza and bovine viral diarrhea, then adjusted it so it could protect against bird flu, too.

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A new zero-knowledge-powered system enables shielded bitcoin transactions, reflecting a broader push across crypto to address the “privacy gap” keeping institutions off public blockchains.

What to know:

• VerifiedX has launched “Prism,” enabling confidential Bitcoin transactions via vBTC and its VFX token.
• The move comes as institutions increasingly demand privacy-preserving blockchain tools, highlighted by recent XRP Ledger upgrades.
• Zero-knowledge proofs allow transactions to remain verifiable without exposing sensitive data.

A growing push to bring privacy to public blockchains has reached Bitcoin, with VerifiedX unveiling a new layer designed to shield transactions while maintaining auditability.

The system, called Prism, enables encrypted balances, shielded addresses and selective disclosure, allowing users to transact privately while still proving compliance when required, according to an emailed announcement shared with CoinDesk on Thursday.

The timing reflects a broader shift across the industry. The XRP Ledger this week introduced zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) capabilities aimed squarely at institutional users seeking to transact without exposing sensitive data on public ledgers.

That effort highlights what many see as a core barrier to institutional adoption: transparency. While public blockchains provide trust through openness, they also expose balances, counterparties and transaction flows — something institutions typically avoid in traditional finance (TradFi).

Any such development carries added weight when applied to Bitcoin. As the largest digital asset — worth more than the rest of the crypto market combined at times — Bitcoin remains the primary gateway for institutional capital. That means improvements to its functionality, particularly around privacy and usability, have the potential to influence the entire sector more profoundly than similar upgrades on smaller networks.

VerifiedX is applying this model directly to Bitcoin-linked activity rather than building a separate privacy chain. Assets can move between transparent and shielded states, while “viewing keys” enable selective access for auditors or regulators.

Beyond payments, the system supports programmable use cases such as private lending, trading and automated transactions, including agent-driven finance, all without revealing positions or intent onchain.

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Globalists & govts want you to believe that digital ID is unavoidable, to lead you into the digital control grid: perspective

Six months after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his intention to force digital ID for all workers in the UK, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) for Global Change says that the UK public could still be persuaded to accept one of the key components of the digital control grid.

According to the TBI report, “What Does the UK Public Think About Digital ID?” which was published on March 27:

“Our research finds that 43 per cent of respondents support the introduction of a digital-ID system in the UK, with 37 per cent opposed and 20 per cent undecided on the issue. While public support is narrower and more conditional than it was in the summer of 2025, net sentiment remains positive. That is a recoverable position.”

For its report, TBI contracted Yonder Consulting to do a follow-up poll on the British public’s perception of digital identity, after previous polling claimed that 62 percent of the population was onboard.

“While support is narrower and more conditional than before, a voluntary national digital-ID program remains politically viable and recoverable”Tony Blair Institute, “What Does the UK Public Think About Digital ID?”, March 2026

The questions in the latest Yonder poll were framed to show the potential benefits of digital ID, saying that it would be voluntary, free, quick, secure, and convenient.

And the TBI report concluded that one of the biggest obstacles to public acceptance of digital ID lay not particularly in the technical aspects, but rather a distrust of governments and institutions in general.

To overcome the issue of trust, the solution is to ignore how completely untrustworthy governments and institutions have become in the first place, and instead to focus on the shiny bells and whistles of convenience.

“People with low institutional trust are far more likely to oppose digital ID”Tony Blair Institute, “What Does the UK Public Think About Digital ID?”, March 2026

According to TBI, “When digital ID is presented as gradual, secure, optional and focused on improving everyday public services, and when examples are concrete and credible, opposition diminishes and net support increases. The public instinct is not anti-modernization. It is pragmatic. If digital ID is shown to deliver value, protect privacy and improve services in ways people can see and understand, a stronger coalition for reform remains there to be built.”

TBI hopes that the people could overcome their skepticism with heavy doses of framing, propaganda, narrative shifting, and psychological operations (PSYOPs).

According to TBI, “When digital ID is understood as an unavoidable feature of a modern, digitalized society, support increases. When it is seen as optional or unnecessary, backing declines.”

And that’s what they want you to believe — that digital ID is unavoidable.

The UK government consultation on digital ID doesn’t leave any room for the scheme to ever be scrapped; it’s only geared towards how to go about implementing it.

“The government intends to introduce a national digital ID (identity document) system. This will sit at the heart of next-generation digital public services in the UK and support innovation in the wider economy. It will help unlock entirely new ways to offer goods and services, and be key to making people’s interactions with the state as efficient and useful as those they are accustomed to in the private sector, like online banking”UK Government, Making public services work for you with your digital identity, March 2026

For the British government, digital ID won’t be successful without trust:

“The digital ID system will only be a success if people trust it. This trust will only be built if they have a genuine opportunity to shape the system.”

But why is distrust in government and institutions at an all-time high?

You can take your pick, but one example that stands out was the madness behind COVID lockdowns, where citizens all over the world were subjected to the tyranny of public-private measures.

Some governments recommended curfews, lockdowns, and providing proof of vaccination to participate in many aspects of society, such as travelling, going to restaurants, or attending entertainment venues.

But it was the private sector that actually turned those recommendations into their own policies.

So, the UK government can say it won’t mandate digital ID — after it already announced its intentions to do so — but if a private organization declares that you must have a digital ID in order to use their services or purchase their goods, then it’s just as good as being mandatory.

“The government’s newly launched consultation on its digital-ID plans arrives at the right moment and with the right instincts. The system it proposes is well thought through: it is voluntary, can be built on existing infrastructure and is designed so that people no longer have to prove who they are from scratch every time they deal with a different part of government”Tony Blair Institute, “What Does the UK Public Think About Digital ID?”, March 2026

And that’s exactly what unelected globalists and governments alike already know, and that’s what they’re counting on.

They want digital ID to start off being so convenient that it will be voluntarily adopted everywhere.

They want to earn your trust. To get you hooked on the system. To lead you into the digital control grid.

Once enough people are onboard, then the rug can be pulled at anytime, for any reason.

Policies change. Administrations come and go. Crises can be declared at any moment.

When these happen, any voluntary digital ID can become mandatory in an instant.

“Framing digital ID primarily as an enforcement tool risks narrowing its coalition rather than broadening it“Tony Blair Institute, “What Does the UK Public Think About Digital ID?”, March 2026

And what are the motives of TBI? Tony Blair is a member of the Labour Party. The Labour Party is made up almost exclusively of members of the Fabian Society.

The Fabian Society’s goal is to achieve socialism with “multilateral international cooperation,” and it’s tactics are not geared towards quick, revolutionary change, but rather the slow creep towards a “classless society,” to be achieved incrementally and gradually over decades, one tiny policy change at a time, until the globalist agenda is fully realized.

And who’s backing TBI? Why, none other than CIA-backed Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is good friends with Blair.

A recent article co-published by The New Statesman and Democracy for Sale in Lighthouse Report states that “Ellison invested $130 million in the TBI [Tony Blair Institute] between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since then.”

Together, Blair and Ellison want to build national data libraries on every person, place, and thing in every country — to feed AI with that data and to know everything about the population.

“All this [fragmented] information we have about our country […] We need to take that and unify that into a single database, so when we ask questions, the data model has all the information it needs to answer the question, discover the insight, and recommend an action”Larry Ellison, World Governments Summit, February 2025

Another huge proponent of digital ID is frequent flyer of Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet Bill Gates, who together with the United Nations and partners of the Rockefeller Foundation launched the 50-in-5 campaign to install Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in 50 countries by 2028.

DPI is a civic technology stack consisted of three foundational components: digital identity, fast payments systems that can include programmable digital currencies, and massive data exchanges between public and private entities.

TBI also wants facial recognition to become ubiquitous across the UK, along with a national police force and digital forensics agency.

When nationwide facial recognition is combined with digital ID and programmable digital currencies, what you get is a recipe for total control — control over communications, consumptions, transactions, and travel.

The digital ID mission creep mirrors that of the Fabian Society modus operandi — one tiny policy switch at a time until the change is irreversible.

Image Source: AI generated with ChatGPT

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The second Trump administration arrived in the wake of the brutal Covid experience, with the hope of gutting the deep state. A public demand for dramatic reform of oppressive government agencies – and the industries that influence them – was on the docket. 

Reform efforts, however, have been met with frustration. The entire machinery is set up to resist the influence of a politically hostile takeover. For example, Moderna, the company tasked with the development of mRNA shots for Covid, has been given the green light to further develop the technology for a flu shot, among other grave disappointments. 

The operations of the FDA have been pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, the efforts are directed toward better efficacy and safety testing, obviously in light of the disastrous experiment with mRNA shots rolled out to inoculate the population. The resulting injury and death is a scandal for the ages. On the other hand, pharmaceutical companies hoped for speedier approvals and less red tape, consistent with Republican demands for decades. 

It’s the same with food. The HHS has prioritized healthier real food instead of decades of subsidies for highly processed, nutrient-barren junk food designed to use up surplus grains that have been subsidized since the early 1970s. Americans meanwhile assume – thanks to the FDA and the Department of Agriculture – that anything for sale for people or animals has surely passed some kind of safety and health standards, which is far from true. 

A worthy thought experiment: how would drug approvals and food safety be managed in the absence of such government agencies? The thesis: the free and competitive marketplace would likely be far more strict and exacting than these government agencies. Private solutions would emerge as the standard bearers of approvals, in a way similar to how the private Underwriters Laboratory (founded 1894) codifies the safety of appliances, the Better Business Bureau (founded 1912) polices fraud in business, and actuaries in many sectors assess and price risk. 

Anyone in a free market can sell anything. Doing so profitably over the long term and earning consumer trust is an entirely different matter. Markets have their own way of regulating safety, efficacy, and quality, often in ways that are more strict than government agencies have traditionally permissioned. 

Let’s look at the history. 

Vaccines and drugs were the first two consumer products in American history to be regulated by government agencies. The Biologics Control Act of 1902 regulated the production and sale of biological products, specifically vaccines, serums, antitoxins, and similar items. It required annual licensing of manufacturers, facility inspections, supervision by a scientist, and proper labeling (including expiration dates). 

This Congressional action came directly in response to the wave of vaccine injuries and death in 1901. A diphtheria antitoxin in St. Louis killed 13 children, while a contaminated smallpox vaccine in Camden, New Jersey, killed 9 more. Crucially, these tragedies gained public attention through media amplification whereas most vaccine injury remains a private and unpublicized matter. The public was outraged in part because it confirmed widespread suspicion of these products born of long experience. 

The industry was clearly in deep trouble. It lobbied for the 1902 law to shore up confidence in a manner consistent with its efforts before and since. 

As historian Terry S. Coleman points out, “the 1902 Act was an initiative of the large biologics manufacturers,” with the help of the American Medical Association and led by Parke-Davis, which was acquired in 1970 by Warner-Lambert and again by Pfizer In 2000. “It is impossible to disentangle the desire for strict regulations to boost public confidence in biologics,” he writes, “from the desire for such regulations to eliminate competitors.” 

Thus did the creation of the agency formed by the Congressional action (the Hygienic Laboratory, part of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, under the Treasury Department, and later to become the National Institutes of Health) served to create a private cartel of drug and vaccine manufacturers, crowding out private solutions and disabling the normal market-based rule of caveat emptor or buyer beware. 

This is exactly what the biggest players in the industry intended. It was a brilliant strategy. Pretend to be deeply vexed by a government crackdown while pulling the strings behind the scenes of a new agency that the public trusts more than the industry. This was not only the birth of a new path toward public management of this one industry; it was the origin of the regulatory state itself insofar as it intervenes directly in the consumer marketplace. 

Four years later, the meatpacking industry was in big trouble from the popular book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906). The expose caused a collapse in the sales of the processing and canning industry as the public reverted back to trusting only local food and onsite processing from farmers. A powerful industry needed to do something. 

The meatpacking industry took a cue from the vaccine industry and pushed for regulation. The result was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It targeted adulterated or misbranded foods and drugs in interstate commerce. All evidence suggests that meatpacking became less safe as a result. The industry faced higher compliance costs that squeezed out smaller competitors and less stringent safety standards, while gaining public confidence. 

These two acts of Congress became the foundation of what became the Food and Drug Administration, which is tasked with investigating and approving products for their safety and effectiveness. Crucially, industry has been the controlling force from the beginning, the very reason the agency exists. The point was not to protect the public but to protect the largest firms within their respective industries. 

The route by which this happened is rather circuitous. The industries went to government and pleaded to be regulated, thus shoring up market position in two directions: increasing costs for upstart firms and disabling public incredulity toward the safety and efficacy of their products. 

Today, people talk about industry capture of agencies but this is probably not the right term. The agencies were formed out of the pleas of industry. This is not just true for food and drugs but also for banking, transportation, industry structure, and communications technology, as Gabriel Kolko has demonstrated in his sweeping study of the Progressive Era. 

It’s true that these historical facts are hardly understood at all, even by economic historians. This is why we need the entire history of the modern regulatory state rewritten and reconceptualized without romantic delusions about good government actors seeking the well-being of the public. 

This historical and present reality poses a serious dilemma for reformers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who have pledged to eliminate the corrupt relationship between industry and government and rid the agencies of conflicts of interest. The agencies themselves were founded in conflicts of interest. An attempt to gut them would turn them into something they have never been. 

Now to the original question: what would regulate these industries if the FDA were not around at all? In electronics and business quality, we find the answer. These two industries face strict control emerging organically from consumer demand alone. 

Institutions like Underwriters Laboratory and the Better Business Bureau are titans in these sectors with no assistance from government. User ratings emerging in the digital era have a vast impact on sales success, as any Amazon seller can tell you. And in industries like sports, household construction, and driving skill, private insurers exercise a dominant influence through financial carrots and sticks, as directed by actuaries assessing risks. 

The very existence of the FDA has crowded out such elaborate and complex systems in the case of food and drugs, which is precisely why their safety and efficacy is the subject of such huge public controversy. 

In fact, if you look at the Covid shots alone, consider that no company operating within a market framework could ever have gotten away with such widespread distribution of such ineffective, unsafe, and largely unnecessary products, which were mislabeled as vaccines from the beginning. Not only would a private rating agency decline to approve them, the imposition of normal liability standards would have made insuring the manufacturers and distributors completely unaffordable. 

The vaccine industry even from its inception has relied on disabling market forces via a range of interventions: zero-priced distribution, wartime inoculation of soldiers, legalized and court-imposed mandates, exclusions of refuseniks from education and professional life, subsidies, patent sharing with agencies, liability indemnifications, and finally invoking emergency needs to bypass normal standards of safety. 

Given all of this, we have no idea what the status of these products would be in a normal market environment. Maybe the industry would not even be financially viable, which is precisely why the industry has built such a powerful lobbying machine. Indeed this was the industry claim when it won its liability shield in 1986: it said it would otherwise face complete bankruptcy. 

It’s the same with food. What began with the meatpackers has extended to every other food source. The New Deal imposed a central-planning apparatus to keep prices high via output controls and even mandates to plow up crops to take them off the market. Wartime price controls and rationing redirected production energies away from whole foods toward industrialized substitutes. And the huge push of the 1970s for maximum output started the trend away from local and small farmers toward land consolidation and overproduction of grains. This is also the period when mass use of chemical herbicides and fertilizers came into common use. 

All the while, the public was blindsided because government agencies continually assured us that all was well. These products are safe and nutritious. Absent such impositions, regulations, subsidies, and indemnifications, the sectors of food and drugs generally would operate very differently. 

Today there are many efforts on the part of nonprofits working to educate the public on many topics related to individual and public health. They work at cross purposes with these agencies that have worked to foist onto the markets what the market would have otherwise been inclined to either filter out, deprecate, or reject entirely. 

Could we do without the FDA? We would likely be far better off. 

For more on the ways that government intervention reduces market-based incredulity while subsidizing fraud, ill health, dangerous products, and lies, see my interview with Stephan Kinsella. 

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