Brownstone Institute
The New York Times: Latest Descent into Madness

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Sunday morning Belle and her husband drove to the emergency room at the University of North Carolina Hospital; got two rabies shots, one in each arm; and “paid $600 E.R. copays with heftier hospital bills to come.”
The New York Times really outdid itself this past weekend. On Sunday, the it published an Op Ed titled, “A Bat Flew Into My Bedroom and Reminded Me of All We Take for Granted.” I took the bait — I found the strange mix of triviality and hyperbole irresistible.

The article starts out innocently enough. A mom in North Carolina, Belle Boggs, didn’t like the oppressive summer heat and the evening news so she went to bed early. But things quickly went off the rails.
While she slept, her husband (who was working late) left a screen door open and a bat flew into the house. A light sleeper, she noticed the bat, told her husband to capture it (so that they could turn it in to the authorities!) but the bat flew away.
That should be the end of the story, right?
Nope, Belle Boggs was just getting started. She lets us know that this incident was part of a heroic journey. “What happened over the next few days restored my faith in the systems in our country that keep us safe.” What!?
I’ll let her explain:
To decide what to do next, we consulted every resource.
Richard, my husband, read the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website.
I called our health care after-hours line and spoke to a nurse who also consulted the C.D.C.
We called our county’s animal control center, and an officer was at our house within 10 minutes. He searched the house and garage for bats, found none and put in a report to our county’s public health department.
Lady, THE BAT DID NOT TOUCH YOU AND FLEW AWAY.
But Belle’s undiagnosed hypochondria was now in full bloom. So on Sunday morning Belle and her husband drove to the emergency room at the University of North Carolina Hospital; got two rabies shots, one in each arm; and “paid $600 E.R. copays with heftier hospital bills to come.”
Wait, she got rabies shots because she saw a bat that flew away!? That makes no sense.
But it gets worse because she uses this harrowing tale — a bat flew into her house and then out again — to launch into a political critique!
She explains that Donald Trump and Project 2025 want to shrink the administrative state. And that is bad because the layers and layers of civil service officers (C.D.C., night nurse, county animal control center, and university hospital) are what kept her safe from this bat that flew into her house and then out again on its own without touching anyone.
She concludes the op-ed by saying that she’s supporting Kamala Harris because “I don’t want to live in a country that doesn’t hold the health and safety of its citizens in high regard, and I don’t want to be left to make important decisions without guidance from qualified professionals. But for now and for at least the next six months, I don’t. I live in the United States of America — land of bats, land of doctors, land of public health — and that’s worth fighting for.”
It apparently never occurred to Belle that these “qualified health professionals” might be part of the problem.
The crack editors at the New York Times thought this was one of the best op-eds they’d read all week so they published it in the Sunday Opinion Section read by millions of people.
II. A Technical Aside
To be clear, I take the threat of rabies seriously. According to StatNews there were 89 rabies deaths in the US from 1960 to 2018 (so, about 1.5 per year). An estimated 96% of bats don’t have rabies but the remaining 4% do, so prudence is in order. One still has to get scratched or bitten though in order to get infected and that’s extremely rare (because bats are scared of humans and try to avoid us).
What Belle Boggs and the New York Times absolutely refuse to do is to look up how many people are injured by rabies vaccines every year — that’s the information one needs in order to do a proper cost-benefit comparison.
So I went over to OpenVAERS to find the results for myself. I discovered that:
- Since 1990 there have been 6,305 VAERS reports of rabies vaccine injuries including 184 deaths.
- If one restricts the search to just the US there are 4,332 VAERS reports of rabies vaccine injuries including 9 deaths.
- Those are really high numbers of injuries given that so few rabies vaccines are administered every year (a CDC Rabies Vaccine information Statement from 2009 claims 16,000 to 39,000 people are vaccinated against rabies in the US every year as compared with over 150 million flu shots annually).
- And remember: the underreporting factor for VAERS is between 10 and 100 so the actual number of rabies vaccine injuries and deaths are likely much higher.
Furthermore, if you’re bitten, what saves your life is human rabies immune globulin (HRIG), not the vaccine (immunity to rabies from the vaccine takes much longer to develop).
So if one has not been exposed and is not in a high-risk group (bat researchers for example) the rabies vaccine is almost all risk and no benefit.
My hunch is that Belle Boggs actually got HRIG in one arm and the rabies vaccine in the other, rather than “two rabies vaccines” as she claimed — please see additional details below.
III. Takeaways
My takeaways from the article are that:
• Vaccines in general and Covid in particular broke the brains of progressives.
• These people are now completely insane.
• I should not have to explain this but you do NOT need a rabies shot if you happen to see a bat!
• Hypochondria is a serious mental illness; Belle Boggs and her husband need psychological counseling not rabies shots.
• Articles like this convince me of the urgent need to abolish the administrative state.
• The grifters in public health need to stop taking advantage of crazy Democrats who are not thinking straight.
Also, what is going on with the New York Times!? Do they really believe that a small flying mammal who made one wrong turn is equivalent to fighting a house fire with a single glass of water (as the graphic accompanying the article suggests)!?

And is this really the sort of cutting-edge journalism that they want in the Sunday Opinion section? Is everyone at the New York Times now just completely nuts?
But then there is a final twist. Longtime uTobian reader April Smith pointed out that there is a new mRNA rabies vaccine. Was this article actually paid product placement to try to get this new shot approved? Given everything we know about the New York Times seems more than likely.
I note also that the CDC recently published Rabies Post-exposure Prophylaxis which includes a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG) and FOUR DOSES of rabies vaccine. Perhaps the CDC just placed the article to try to sell more product on behalf of their Pharma patrons?
Bats feed every evening at dusk where I live. They swoop and swirl eating the bugs — mosquitoes mostly. They are incredibly beautiful and they use echolocation to avoid coming in contact with us. I’ve been inside temples, caves, and archeological sites in Southeast Asia with thousands of bats and never feared for my safety. I don’t want to live in Belle Boggs’ hypochondriacal dystopia where the risks of nature are exaggerated and toxic injections are worshipped.
We are a part of nature, inseparable, and this extreme estrangement from nature is the source of so much misery. Healing from the current crisis does not require more civil servants, it requires a restored relationship with the natural world. I’m grateful for the people who understand this and are troubled by the New York Times’ brazen attempts to manufacture unnecessary anxiety and increased alienation.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Brownstone Institute
Hysteria over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Promise to Make Vaccines Safer

From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?

The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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