Between The Headlines

  • Study Finds Americans One Overdraft Away From Googling “What Are Guillotines?”

  • New “Pro-Family” Law Protects Families By Punishing Them For Being Poor In Public: “Once They Know, They’ll Just Stop Being Poor!”

  • Chef On Dining Trends: Republicans Order Freedom, Democrats Substitute Process, Working People Get The Check

  • New Algorithm Confirms: You’re Depressed! But Are You Monetizing Your Despair Like The Pros Do? Click Here For The Trick To Crying Gold!

  • Administration Announces “Historic Investment” In The Public Good, Immediately Subcontracts It To A VC Fund

Eyes on the decay

Weekly Roundup

Well, we made it through another week at the mercy of global capital… and what’s been the latest horrors-of-the-week? How about war crimes off the coast of Venezuela being perpetrated by practically the entire Cabinet and DoD staffs (a sort of joint task force for crimes against humanity) for starters? Netanyahu isn’t the only strongman who likes to double-tap helpless civilians.

The Tennessee special election that had Democrats hopeful for a congressional seat-flip turned out to be a blowout - “but look how much less of a blowout it was,” said every Dem-simping hack pundit on cable the following morning said, voice quivering with denial. They offer excuses rather than paths forward, predictably, and it’s about the last time I’ll abide a consolation prize exchange following a loss so critical.

The cavalry’s not coming folks - time to either save ourselves or get used to the taste of MAGA boots.

You’re reading Surviving Late-Stage Capitalism - the best spot for cheeky armchair wonkery and thoughtful analysis alike. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the latest edition of my newsletter, which features three carefully crafted pieces on interrelated topics: RFK and the MAHA-rons destruction of objective truth and a look at the little-discussed-yet-hellish conditions in the West Bank.

Please subscribe if you like the content featured here; we look forward to writing to you more often!

Let’s dive in.

RFK, Jr., the Rise of MAHA, And The Destruction of Truth

The Trump administration called fabricated research citations “formatting issues."

Let me say that again: They made up scientific studies, got caught, and their official response was essentially "Oops, typo."

That's not spin. That's gaslighting so brazen it deserves its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The only thing Trump 2.0's cabinet demonstrates consistent competence in is dishonesty.

But here's what really gets me about this whole MAHA disaster: the audacity isn't accidental. Calling fabricated studies a "formatting issue" is like calling arson "aggressive interior decorating." The language choice tells you everything about how they view the American public.

They Know Exactly What They're Doing

They've beaten the average American down so consistently and for so long that you could piss on them and tell them it's raining, just for them to apologize for not having an umbrella.

That's the reality we're living in.

When scientists who were supposedly attached to this "gold-standard" report come out saying they're confused about their own alleged involvement, you're watching something darker than incompetence. Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes told reporters that the paper cited "is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved in." Columbia University professor Guohua Li was more direct: "The reference was totally fabricated."

This shows the absolute dearth of respect that MAGA has for themselves, for society, and for reality itself.

RFK Jr. called this report a "milestone" achievement filled with "gold standard" science. The same report that CBS News medical contributor Dr. Céline Gounder said had "fingerprints of AI all over it," calling the errors "not just sloppiness but really unethical behavior."

The Strategic Dismantling of Truth

Here's what people miss: This isn't some intern making a mistake.

Since Trump took office, the administration has terminated $2.3 billion in life-saving NIH research. They've proposed gutting the NIH budget by 43 percent—about $20 billion. They've laid off thousands of scientists and grant administrators at NIH and across HHS.

That takes effort. That takes planning.

Why go through all that trouble instead of just doing bad science? Because this reinforces the power structure they want strengthened in the moment and limits access to that manufactured leverage to the tiny, bruised hands of our Fearless Leader.

It's about controlling who gets to manufacture truth.

The Vault Is Wide Open

Now look at the timing. The supplement industry is thriving in this exact moment when oversight is being gutted.

That's an opportunistic cash grab. The vault is wide open, and they'd be fools not to take a couple ingots.

But this isn't just convenient timing. There were backroom negotiations that led to the regulation smoothie whipped up by Trump 2.0. With backroom deals come sweet, sweet kickbacks.

For some of them, money is the endgame. For the spookier ones, like Peter Thiel, no amount of money will ever be enough.

The MAHA-churian Candidate

And RFK Jr.? He's what I'd call a MAHA-churian candidate: good pedigree, international platform, and at the end of the day a weirdo who staged a bear homicide and thinks vaccines and Tylenol will give a person autism.

They should be so lucky.

RFK Jr. is a classic "useful idiot." A famous last name doing the dirty work while the real architects operate behind him.

Kennedy himself said that agencies under his authority will be separated from "corrupt" practices of respected medical research institutions. The NIH would likely "stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they're all corrupt."

Instead, the nation's leading health agencies will apparently just make the studies up and hope no one notices.

What Happens When Reality Becomes Optional

This is what replacing evidence-based reality looks like in practice.

Researcher Mariana G. Figueiro discovered the MAHA report mischaracterized her study on screen time and sleep: "The conclusions in the report are not accurate and the journal reference is incorrect." The study wasn't even done in children—it was done in college students.

Dr. Harold J. Farber called the report's generalizations about asthma medication "a tremendous leap of faith to generalize from a study in one Medicaid managed care program in Texas using 2011 to 2015 data to national care patterns in 2025."

When you dismantle the infrastructure that could challenge your claims, you create an environment where unverified claims and profitable supplements can thrive.

The same day these false citations were first reported, the version available online was quickly updated to remove all "oaicite" demarcations—those telltale markers of AI-generated content. Hours after the White House briefing, an updated version appeared with the fictitious citations replaced with new references.

HHS called them "minor citation and formatting errors."

The Method to This Madness

AI researcher Oren Etzioni warned: "If AI tools were used to generate citations for a federal report, that raises serious accountability questions. Without clear disclosure or verification processes, there is no way for readers to know whether the information is grounded in real evidence."

But that's the point.

This isn't incompetence. It's a deliberate strategy to replace evidence-based reality with agenda-driven "truth." When the loudest voice or the deepest pockets determine scientific fact, we're not living in a democracy anymore.

We're living in a Choose Your Own Adventure book where the ending has already been written, and the only choice you get is whether to believe the lies or get labeled as part of the "corrupt" establishment.

The MAHA movement isn't rejecting the scientific method by accident. They're rejecting it because the scientific method has standards. It has accountability. It has peer review.

And standards are the enemy when your entire agenda is built on fabrications.

The Animal Farm

Farm To Table Satire

  • Global Hunger, Now With Better Charts
    Nearly 300 million people faced acute hunger in 2024; in response, world leaders held panels, published glossy reports, and bravely committed to doing exactly what caused the crisis in the first place.

  • Debt-for-Dinner Diplomacy
    Kenya cuts a billion-dollar “debt-for-food” deal with the U.S., swapping long-term sovereignty for the privilege of not starving quite so loudly this quarter.

  • Tractors in the Capital, Water on Empty
    Mexican farmers have parked their tractors in front of Congress because, shockingly, you can’t irrigate fields with neoliberal talking points and a new water law written in air-conditioned offices.

  • USDA’s Bridge to Nowhere In Particular
    D.C. is dangling “bridge payments” so farmers don’t go under before the 2026 programs arrive, basically asking them to keep planting on faith and fumes while the paperwork catches up.

  • Farm Bill, Kicked Down a Dirt Road
    Congress has once again punted the farm bill down the road, leaving core ag programs hanging by a thread so lawmakers can get back to the real business of culture-war soundbites and donor brunches.

  • Carbon Farming, Profit Harvesting
    The EU’s new “carbon farming” push pays landowners to stash carbon in their fields so big polluters can keep belching smoke, turning farmers into subcontractors for corporate greenwashing.

  • Family Farms in the Red, Stocks in the Black
    With crop margins running negative for a third straight year, family farms are bleeding cash while the agribusiness giants that set their prices toast to another record quarter on earnings call.

Genocide for Nothin’, Ethnic Cleansing For Free

The media keeps asking if we're headed toward a third Intifada. Wrong question.

The violence is already here. It's been here. We're just arguing about what to call the response.

Reports show at least 11 Palestinians wounded in settler attacks across the West Bank - farmers near Hebron, injuries requiring hospitalization in Halhul, a man shot by IDF gunfire in Qalqilya, a 64-year-old assaulted near the Allenby Bridge. And the framing stays the same: concerns about escalation.

You know what that framing does? It treats Palestinian resistance as the primary threat while rendering ongoing settler violence as background noise.

The Machinery Works in Coordination

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir distributed over 120,000 firearms to settlers after October 7. He goes on TV and announces this shit with great glee. "This week, we reached a milestone," he celebrated. "The 100,000th citizen received their firearms license."

This isn't rogue actors. This is state policy with a thin coat of plausible deniability.

The UN recorded more than 700 settler attacks between October 7 and April 3, 2024. Soldiers in uniform were present in nearly half of them. Former IDF soldiers testified they don't have orders to stop violent settlers—only to protect the Jewish community. Hundreds confirmed none received an order to detain a settler attacking a Palestinian.

The settlers emerge the moment IDF escorts leave. Armed with rifles and clubs. The coordination is obvious to anyone watching.

Overclocked Colonization

From October 7, 2023, to December 31, 2024, UN data tracked at least 1,860 incidents of settler violence in the occupied West Bank - roughly four attacks a day, according to an Al Jazeera analysis of OCHA figures. Four attacks per day. Four different bloodthirsty mobs.

This is the natural endpoint of the project moving at warp speed. When you take land quickly, you gain footholds quickly, which lets you take more land, even more quickly. The feedback loop accelerates until you're watching the starkness of it emerge in real time.

Over 1,600 Palestinians were displaced between October 7, 2023 and September 2024 due to settler harassment and intimidation. That includes 794 children. Since the war began, 19 isolated Palestinian communities comprising about 1,100 residents were forcibly displaced following settler violence, sometimes accompanied by soldiers.

The West Bank has been carved into Bantustans. You can't disaggregate that mess. You can't have fifty different Palestinian states depending on what alley you go down.

The False Equivalence Keeps the Machinery Running

Here's the myth that needs to die: that Israel and Palestine are somehow equal actors in this.

Israel has an air force, artillery, tanks, and a massive military. Gaza has glorified fireworks. At this point, Hamas exists mostly as a name tag people put on to feel some affiliation with others being slaughtered in front of their eyes.

When people ask "Where is Hamas?" while Israel continues its bombardment, they're not looking for an answer. They're saying the thing to get to the next thing. Short-term squirrel-brain thinking. It means as much as "Where's the beef?" does now.

The refusal to acknowledge this power imbalance is deliberate. Once you admit the disparity, you can't avoid confronting the genocide happening right before our eyes.

This Is Settler Colonialism's Operating System

What's happening in Palestine runs on the same operating system as the conquest of Native Americans. European settlers displacing indigenous populations, claiming divine or civilizational right to the land, using overwhelming force to maintain control.

The skeletal makeup of modern Western society is built on settler colonialism. The old structures are still there. You can reform away from it to a point, but eventually you have to acknowledge the system isn't salvageable through minor adjustments.

The baby drowned years ago.

The Distraction Serves the Displacement

The media's fixation on a potential third Intifada serves a specific function: distraction.

If we can get back to the scary Muslims narrative, Israel can go ahead and do another three or four months of genocide before anyone notices. The pattern repeats because it works. Settlers attack, IDF provides cover, media focuses on potential Palestinian response, territorial acquisition continues during the distraction.

Over 90% of complaints regarding settler violence filed by Palestinians with Israeli police have been closed without indictment. After October 7, Ben-Gvir instructed police not to enforce the law against violent settlers, according to Israeli investigative journalists.

The impunity is the point.

And where's the UN? Oh wait - the US has veto power. Palestine doesn't get support from the international community because we put our thumb on the scale so we can keep selling weapons to the Israeli military. The military-industrial complex keeps cashing those dividend checks while Dick Cheney sleeps comfortably in his shadowy grave.

What You Can Actually Do

Read different media. If you're not getting this perspective from your current sources, find independent thinkers who aren't beholden to access-preservation incentives. CNN is top to bottom Zionist - you're not going to get a fair narrative there.

Once you see clearly, you're tasked with signal boosting. Get the word to people who haven't heard yet. Make sure they cannot say "I was not aware of this."

Because one day everyone will have always been against this. People who are on record right now saying "go ahead and butcher them all, nuke the whole thing, I don't even care" will come out wringing their hands about the plight of Palestinians when it serves their interests.

But not until then.

The question isn't whether violence will escalate. Violence is already at ethnic cleansing levels. The question is whether we'll acknowledge it before Palestinians are forced to resist in ways we can no longer ignore.

We're not waiting for a third Intifada.

We're watching a coordinated ethnic cleansing in real time and pretending the problem is what comes next.

When you’re ready to start fighting back, here’s where you can find me:

SLSC Straight To Your Inbox - Left-wing analysis, short-form and long-form satire, and a whole lotta chutzpah, comin’ at ya every Tuesday and Friday morning.
Follow Me On Bluesky or Twitter- Some earnestposting, some shitposting - sometimes both at once.
Writing For The Propaganda Factory’s Substack - I’ve been made their Substack editor, so check out my work here as well as a few other very talented writers/creators.

Keep Reading

No posts found