***Unplanned and unwelcome post***

President Trump was interviewed by the New York Times this week. The newspaper reported:

‘President Trump declared on Wednesday evening that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality,” brushing aside international law and other checks on his ability to use military might to strike, invade or coerce nations around the world.”’

During the same interview:

‘“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed…the landmass of Greenland.’

Trump is still clearly feeling the high of sending the military to capture President Maduro of Venezuela last weekend - and this makes him especially dangerous.

On Friday, in a press conference following a meeting with oil companies discussing their exploitation of Venezuelan oil, Trump said “So we’re going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way”.

This made me feel literally sick because at the end of November, Trump warned Nicolás Maduro that he can “do things the easy way … or the hard way” - and we now know where that led.

Below I’ve plotted the actions I’ve recorded on the TrumpActionTracker concerning Greenland (a member of NATO) since January 2025.

Two things are immediately clear - 1) that threatening Greenland was one of the first thing that Trump did in his second term, and 2) that there has been a clear escalation in rhetoric in the last few weeks - starting a week before the Venezuela operation on 3 January 2026.

Trump has consistently refused to rule out military force and Defense Secretary Hegseth even implied to Congress in June that invasion plans existed. Trump appointed the US’ first ‘special envoy’ to Greenland just before Christmas and then said “we have to have it”. The day after capturing Maduro, Trump threatened Greenland and a day after that his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland”.

On Wednesday, the White House Press Secretary was explicit in saying that military force remained an active option for acquiring control over Greenland. Also on Wednesday, Trump told reporters on Air Force One “We'll worry about Greenland in about two months. Let's talk about Greenland in 20 days”.

I don’t know what Trump is planning, but his ‘easy way or hard way’ threat to Maduro came just over 5 weeks before capturing him. Over and over again this year has shown that Trump is following through on his worst instincts. I think Greenlanders, Denmark and the rest of NATO need to be extremely worried - and prepared.

It took me having real distance from my marriage to be able to acknowledge this in my head and out loud: I was not an easy person to be married to. For plenty of reasons probably, including my lazy habit of not screwing the lid back tight on the peanut butter jar, but specifically for the fact that I struggled with addiction off and on for so many years. We were married for a long time, so there were many periods of sobriety, but too many where I tried and failed to hide substance abuse. I dealt with this like every addict does, by lying and getting defensive and turning things around and often behaving like I was the victim.

That created an unhealthy dynamic in our marriage for a long time, where he had to be the cop and I was the fuckup. It was hard not to internalize and believe these roles, I felt like ultimately I was never in the right because I was the one who was the addict. I was the worst one, you know? I always felt that way, deep down. I felt like I had no right to feel like things weren’t working for me if he was the one who stayed when I was at my worst.

He did stay, after all. He stayed through the lowest of my low points. The worst day of my life in terms of pure shame was also the day I stopped drinking. I still can’t really talk about it without wanting to, you know, die, but it involved me secretly getting drunk when I was at the cabin with my young boys and his parents. His parents had to take the boys to sleep with them while I slept off being absolutely shitfaced, and then I had to face them the next morning. And I drove home with the worst soul-eroding hangover on earth and I did not drink again after that day. May, 2013.

I hope my boys have very few memories of me being altered. I did get very good at hiding, I was a high functioning fuckup for the most part. But of course we always think we’re good at hiding when the reality is it’s apparent to other people.

Struggling with my demons always felt to me like it was my battle to fight alone, but the truth is I impacted those around me and John most of all. He was angry with me, he was supporting of me, he was encouraging, he was frustrated, he was all of the things. He probably could have benefited from something like Al-Anon. He was dragged through it and none of that was his fault.

All to say, there are no heroes or villains in our story. We are both just humans. I do think overall we had a good marriage, it wasn’t always easy but there were some really good times. I’m sad and sorry we aren’t in a better place now, but maybe that will change someday.

I cannot live in shame and regret, I did that for too long and it was so damaging. It is the job of every addict to find acceptance for what was and let that be, let it help us strive to be better but not hold us down in self loathing. I am so sorry for every bad choice, and yet I have come to feel like it all shapes who I am now. I have so much empathy for those who struggle, I feel so humble and grateful for all the good things in my life. I am so incredibly thankful that my boys don’t have to worry about me or experience me in unrecognizable behaviors.

I spent a lot of my life wishing I could undo so many things, but I don’t feel that way now. It all had meaning, even the shittiest parts. It all taught me something. I’m not who I used to be and that’s okay, we all change as time goes on. And sometimes we grow apart.

More than 420 state bills “attacking longstanding public health protections such as vaccines, milk safety and fluoride” have been introduced in the U.S. so far in 2025, an Associated Press investigation determined in October. Around 30 bills in 12 states have already been enacted or adopted.

The onslaught against American public health includes the calculated paralysis and internal gutting of agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, through what the AP calls “an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory–driven agenda into law.”

From the earliest months of the covid pandemic, long before the first Trump administration gave Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines emergency approval in December 2020, the disinformation was already a blizzard. By March that year, it involved a coordinated effort to remove all mitigations, for a campaign of intentional mass infection among the unvaccinated, based on the discredited idea that doing so with a novel pathogen would pave the way to lasting immunity.

It hasn’t so far. As in the UK, mass infection across the States has instead driven outsized rises in long-term sickness. Thousands of research papers on PubMed and other healthcare databases now confirm that repeat reinfection from SARS-CoV2, the virus causing covid, is commonly associated with lasting immune system dysfunction, lymphopenia (damage to T cells), long covid, and multiorgan inflammation.

As shown in Everyone Else Is Lying to You, Jonathan Howard’s outstanding, clear-eyed sequel to We Want Them Infected, the same pro-infection lobby that battled each covid mitigation now seeks to blame U.S. health agencies and vaccines, not the virus, for the nation’s devastating rates of excess death and injury from SARS-CoV2 since 2020.

Disproportionate damage

The United States makes up 4 percent of the world’s population, but by mid-2020 had 25 percent of covid cases worldwide, itself likely an undercount.

That means disproportionate damage relative to peer countries, but also disproportionately fatal errors in response. Almost from the start, Howard shows from meticulous reporting, a battle was pitched against conventional, widely-adopted methods for reducing infectious disease: testing and isolating; masking and ventilating, especially in hospitals and healthcare settings; vaccinating; and adopting air filtration methods for SARS-CoV2 and other airborne pathogens.

“The lockdowns are killing people,” was the key refrain (here, Scott Atlas, quoted in 2020, p. 293). According to current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and other academics associated with the Brownstone Institute’s Great Barrington Declaration, school closures in particular were causing “catastrophic” harm to children, including by shielding them from a virus they somehow had an “obligation” to catch. Other distortions included the suggestion, in the spring of 2020, when morgues were already full, that NYC Emergency Departments weren’t overrun by people with covid, and, when disputed, that NYC Emergency Room respiratory visits may have been panic-driven.

For more than five years, the anti-public health campaign ran on the theme, “Fear the vaccine, not the virus” (224, 250). Concerning the last, whose severity has repeatedly been contested and minimized, the public ought to “stop living in fear” altogether (468).

Fear the vaccine, not the virus

Cavalier from the start about the supposedly “limited” risk of SARS-CoV2 infection to all but the elderly in care, leaving unvaccinated children and teens to suffer the consequences, a group of fringe doctors backed by the partisan Brownstone Institute pushed out a contrarian narrative that, Howard shows, had devastating real-world consequences.

The narrative had to minimize all covid harms but also, somehow, to maximize the damage caused by harm reduction—in this case, from trying to limit and reduce infection. Hence, the group’s coordinated attacks on schools closing from illness among pupils and staff, over the same purposive infection the group was in fact openly encouraging. When contested, its tack with schools changed to concern about “learning loss,” “lockdown damage,” and the supposed “epidemic” of mental health damage that both had caused.

The Brownstone Institute published dozens of articles blaming lockdowns for sky-rocketing rates of long-term sickness; blaming long covid on masking; blaming doctors for faulty and “excessive” intubation of their covid patients; even casting doubt on the actual numbers reported dead and dying, and whether they were inflated.

A coordinated attack on pandemic interventions

In July 2020 and December 2021, investigative reporters Stephanie M. Lee at BuzzFeed and Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch at the Center for Media and Democracy independently confirmed, a coordinated “attack on pandemic interventions” was underway by a pro-infection lobby that was loudest as the Omicron variant surged—and loudest in dismissing the deathly wave it caused as “mild.” As cases and deaths rose, Bragman and Kotch warned, “a shadowy institute filled with fringe doctors” had become “part of big business’ two-year strategy to legitimize attacks on pandemic interventions.” Their report, a major source for Howard’s Everyone Else Is Lying to You, focused on pro-infection lobbyists and academics whose central push, in Bragman and Kotch's words, was to “hijack the war on covid”—to dismantle all remaining mitigations, leaving the virus free to infect almost everyone.

Claiming victory after 1.2 million deaths

For the covid contrarians, an anti-lockdown, pro-infection lobby from the start, the national loss of more than 1.2 million people, a population equivalent to Dallas or San Diego, fails to move or generate concern. Their fame and influence came from podcasts and YouTube channels quick to hypothesize better outcomes from almost-complete inaction. Among the most critical, because tied to greatest risk: that herd immunity would be reached by April 2021 from fewer than 10,000 deaths, mostly from viral infection; that children and teens would not get dangerously ill from SARS-CoV2, and should thus not be “deprived of the opportunity” for infection.

In reality, Howard shows in exhaustive and devastating detail, the covid contrarians not only claim victory even after more than 1.2 million U.S. deaths, but now run the same agencies that are charged with protecting us from the continuing pandemic, as from future ones. According to BNO News, tracking the limited data still reported, “So far this year, more than 5.2 million COVID cases have been reported in the U.S., causing 365,302 hospitalizations and 22,658 deaths.”

“Not only is covid their responsibility,” Howard warns, but “outbreaks of once-controlled diseases are happening on their watch, and it is their job to contain them.” Instead of taking steps to contain outbreaks of covid and measles in schools from Florida to Utah, including by recommending mass vaccination, the same infectious disease contrarians are now sitting on their hands, part of a “movement to deny the entire plan for herd immunity through mass infection even existed.”

Among the most-troubling takeaways from Everyone Else Is Lying to You: while medical disinformation helps a handful of its sponsors, it does untold damage to the agencies entrusted with protecting from the ravages of infectious disease, and to a public still submitting to repeat reinfection on the doubtful assurance that doing so will at some point result in lasting immunity.

Howard, J. Everyone Else Is Lying to You: How the Medical Establishment Weaponized Doubt to Spread COVID, Normalize Quackery, and Undermine Public Health. Redhawk Publications.

Featured image is Anti-vaccination protest near Leicester clock tower, by Pierre Marshall