Volume 82, no. 5 May 2026
In the U.S., the Constitution is the law of the land. All office holders and military officers must take an oath: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and “will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” The Oath of Enlistment for enlisted service members adds: I will “obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over [them], according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Article 90 of the UCMJ states that service members are only obligated to obey lawful orders (https://tinyurl.com/534yvvbm).
In contrast, German soldiers traditionally swore an oath to the Kaiser. After World War I, this changed several times. First to the Weimar constitution, then to their people and country (Volk und Vaterland), and finally to Hitler himself. The attempt to use the Führer oath as a defense in the Nuremberg trials was rejected (https://tinyurl.com/4hcm3btu).
The Constitution is not an isolated bunch of words. It is, as Justice Clarence Thomas explained, the operating manual, while the Declaration of Independence is the mission statement for our country. Both are based on the premise of God-given rights (https://tinyurl.com/2ud7zpf5).
At a prayer event on the National Mall, “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” part of a series of celebrations commemorating America’s 250th birthday, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that our rights do not come from government but from God. MSNBC host Katy Tur asked whether Johnson was somehow “putting God above the Declaration of Independence” (https://tinyurl.com/dnva436f)!
Both documents also assume God-given law, as contained in the Bible. The individual views of some of the Founders notwithstanding, America’s moral architecture is based on Christian principles, as explained in the book The Christian Roots of American Liberty, edited by Dylan Pahman and John Pinheiro. Of critical importance is the protection of private property rights. Historical recognition of the church’s property rights, most notably in the 313 A.D. Edict of Milan, grounds the freedom to own in the freedom to worship (https://tinyurl.com/npwma523). Property is the material foundation for independent existence.
The Decalogue assumes individual dignity and rights—not equality or collective rights. It enjoins giving what is due: honor to God and parents, and respect for what belongs to others: life, spouse, property, and reputation. It forbids covetousness.
The Constitution provides for checks and balances and co-equal branches of government and no king—yet all including government officials were believed to be ultimately accountable to God, or Christ the King, who refused to be an earthly king.
Threefold Threat
The Constitution is currently threatened by three forces that are mutually incompatible but are allied for the present against their common enemy. These are “democratic socialism,” formerly called communism; globalism; and Islam (Sharia).
Communists assert that “property is theft”; the “people” “own” everything. Globalists intend to tokenize everything, so everyone must rent what they use, with permission of the system. Sharia does recognize private ownership, but balances this right with “ethical community responsibilities and divine stewardship.” “Infidels” do not even have the inalienable right to life.
The result of destroying private property rights has always been disaster. When the Gracchi brothers destroyed Rome’s property rights in 133 B.C., redistributing it to landless citizens under the banner of “reform,” their republic collapsed within a century. They created the template for every socialist redistribution scheme that followed. It breaks the link between productive effort and reward, destroying incentives across the entire system. Worse, it teaches demagogues that they could buy votes by promising to redistribute wealth from productive citizens to political supporters (https://tinyurl.com/2tz4s7ws).
The Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster in 1534 demonstrated, centuries before Marx, that collectivism breeds tyranny and starvation. The vision of equality was enforced through systematic terror. Within months, residents were eating rats to survive (https://tinyurl.com/mwy9rthy).
At the 2012 AAPS meeting, Kenneth Christman, M.D., led a virtual tour of American communes: their failure rate was 100% (https://tinyurl.com/46x7jbv3).
Instead of the Constitution and accountability to divine law, communism enthrones the dictates of the ruling party; globalism, the algorithms of the technocratic elite; and Islam, the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. Sharia contradicts the Constitution; taking the oath of office with a hand on the Quran is apparently practicing Taqiyya (tactical deception).
The American Obstacle
The American Constitution is a barrier to the extinction of human dignity and individuality. Today’s threats are basically like those that have occurred with varying details over 2,500 years of history. The analysis by Russian mathematician Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich in the clandestinely written book The Socialist Phenomenon, first published in 1975 (tinyurl.com/2p9nzzbw), concludes that the phenomenon is not misguided benevolence but an impulse for self-destruction dressed in noble words.
The Second Law
In the 19th century, writes Cuba con H de Orthographía, physicist Ludwig Boltzmann observed how the universe seemed to have an irrevocable direction. “Teacups cooled, aromas dispersed, clocks stopped. Order always unraveled.”
The Second Law of Thermodynamics arose from these observations: in a closed system, entropy, or the measure of disorder, randomness, or unusable energy, tends to increase inexorably. Order is not the natural state, but demands constant input of external energy to sustain itself.
“This physical law, one of the most irrefutable in science, does not stop at laboratories. It manifests also in human societies…. Throughout the 20th century, planned socialist regimes attempted to defy this law with Promethean arrogance.”
But in their grand closed system, human entropy began to grow immediately. To combat that growing disorder, the planners needed to inject ever more “external energy”: mass propaganda, secret police, concentration camps, gulags, Stasi, total surveillance. “Repression was not an accident; it was the thermodynamic price of maintaining an unnatural order.”
De Orthographía contrasts this with the thermodynamically open system of market capitalism.
He notes that the contemporary cultural left repeats the same thermodynamic error when attempting to impose a “just social order,” with equity of outcomes, mandatory diversity, purified language, and correct thought on complex societies. When the natural entropy of human differences, preferences, and incentives reappears, it responds with more coercion: cancel culture, digital surveillance, indoctrination in schools, and hate laws.
The experiments that ignore this law promise a planned paradise, establish prisons to maintain the illusion, and finally end with smoldering ruins when the energy of coercion runs out (https://tinyurl.com/3baca63r).
Chesterton’s Fence
In 20th-century England, a young reformer was walking along a rural path when he came upon an old, sturdy fence that crossed the landscape for no apparent reason. Annoyed by that useless obstacle, the young man picked up his ax and prepared to tear it down. At that moment, an old man appeared—G. K. Chesterton—who stopped him with a phrase that would echo through the years: “If you don’t know why that fence is there, don’t tear it down. It was probably put up for a reason you can’t yet see.” Were there wolves, thieves, floods, or chaos?
Chesterton’s Fence is a parable turned into a principle of prudence. The fence represents any institution, norm, or tradition that has endured over time: the family, property, religion, customs. In the 1960s, intellectuals decided to tear down the structures that shaped our world: patriarchy, meritocracy, borders, gender roles, and Christianity. The half-torn down fence is still there. Some are beginning to ask, before we demolish the rest, why don’t we try to understand why it was there? (https://tinyurl.com/33et4dv9).
“Left-wing intellectuals are the ones who preach most about resilience while building glass castles on dynamite.”
Attributed to Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Religion and State in History
In 390 A.D., when the Roman Empire was officially Christian but still governed by imperial habits, the emperor Theodosius I slaughtered thousands of civilians, men, women, and children, as collective punishment for the killing of a Roman military commander in the city of Thessalonica. This was a long-accepted tool of imperial control.
When the emperor later attempted to attend church and receive communion, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, publicly refused him entry, insisting that mass killing, even when ordered by the state, was a moral crime requiring public repentance.
“For the first time in Roman history, a ruler was treated as morally accountable not to another ruler, but to a transcendent standard enforced by the Church,” writes Dan Burmawi (https://tinyurl.com/mrtjaaa2). “The state was no longer morally self-justifying. This moment permanently altered the moral architecture of Western politics.”
Throughout the medieval period, the Church continued to intervene in political life, helping to shape the foundations of the Western world. The principles emerging from Christianity were secularized, systematized, and eventually universalized.
Christianity inherited the moral critique of power from the Hebrew scriptures. In the ancient Near East, religion existed to legitimize power, but in Israel’s system, power was understood to be delegated by God and could be judged by God (ibid.).
The Church’s position changed over time. Eventually, theological principles that had shaped Western political order were reinterpreted as reasons for retreat rather than engagement. The moral vacuum was filled by other frameworks: “historical progress,” “scientific rationality,” and moral relativism. “Authority was no longer restrained by truth, but justified by claims of victimhood,” Burmawi states (ibid.).
Today, political Islam has allied with the Left in reshaping Western society. The alliance is by nature temporary. “The Left seeks the deconstruction of Western civilization. Islam seeks its replacement.”
The Islamic doctrine of al-ḥākimiyya holds that sovereignty belongs exclusively to God and that human legislation is legitimate only insofar as it enforces divine law; thus, secular governance is fundamentally illegitimate. “Under this framework, democracy is not flawed but idolatrous. Human rights are not universal but conditional. Freedom of conscience is not a right but a rebellion against divine authority” (ibid.).
Burmawi states that the Church must publicly defend the “civilizational achievement its theology made possible and reenter public life as a moral witness.” It must “directly challenge the assumption that all cultures are ethically equivalent.” It is the one uniquely capable of sustaining freedom and elevating the weak.
AAPS Calendar
Sep 24-26, 2026. 83rd Annual Meeting, Alpharetta, GA
Private vs. Public Protection
The “acne industrial complex” is a prime example of regulatory capture, writes Dr. Robert Malone. As documented by Valisure, an independent testing laboratory, benzoyl peroxide acne creams contain more than 12 times the FDA’s 2 ppm limit of benzene. One sample contained 1,761 ppm. Benzene is a known carcinogen that can cause leukemia in high amounts, and low-level chronic benzene exposure is linked to an increase in mortality.
The FDA’s response to Valisure’s March 2024 citizen petition requesting the recall of contaminated products has been slow. There is currently a voluntary recall at the retailer level, but no warning label, and no information sent to dermatologists.
Over 11 years, Valisure’s findings have led to more than $12 billion in product recalls. It discovered nitrosamines, potent carcinogens, in Zantac™ (ranitidine).
Much of the FDA’s failure occurred during Janet Woodcock’s decades-long tenure as head of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). She was also central in enabling Operation Warp Speed (https://tinyurl.com/5n7tun82).
As shown in the AAPS lawsuit against FDA, Woodcock played a key role in restricting hydroxychloroquine use in COVID –19 (AAPS News, October 2024).
Conscience Protections Resurrected
Reorganization in the Dept. of Health and Human Services has restored the Civil Rights Division and the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division. The division was launched in 2018 but was “deemphasized” and ultimately dissolved by the Biden Administration. Federal law prohibits punishing medical professionals for abiding by their conscience, but the Biden administration made clear it would not enforce those laws, particularly in the areas of abortion and gender-transition treatments (https://tinyurl.com/3bnssktb). HHS invites those who believe their civil rights have been violated to file a complaint at https://www.hhs.gov/ocr/complaints/index.html.
Government Settles in Berenson v. Biden
In August 2021, journalist Alex Berenson posted a tweet stating that the COVID-19 vaccine does not stop transmission. Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb worked with Biden Administration officials to pressure Twitter to ban Berenson.
As a result of Berenson v. Twitter, Twitter had to reverse the ban. And Berenson gained access to crucial evidence that showed how the White House and Dr. Gottlieb had pressed Twitter to censor him (https://tinyurl.com/5wrhwrfw).
The government has agreed to a six-figure settlement in Berenson v. Biden et al., admitting to exerting “substantial coercive pressure” that violated First Amendment rights. The suit is now moving ahead against its remaining defendants, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb and chairman Dr. Albert Bourla.
In general, private companies and individuals cannot directly violate First Amendment rights. But a federal law known as 1985(3) gives plaintiffs the right to sue in federal courts over conspiracies that keep them from “having and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States.” Berenson alleges a conspiracy against all unvaccinated people who were reading and listening to him as the Biden Administration prepared to force mRNA jabs on healthy adults (https://tinyurl.com/5cr97m68).
The 1871 law has spawned complex legal decisions. A key issue is defining a group, aside from the plaintiff, whose rights were violated. Do unvaccinated people constitute a group that has a First Amendment right to speak, which encompasses a right to listen? (https://tinyurl.com/8wwf2rmn)
Censorship Banned for 10 Years
The 2024 case of Murthy v. Missouri, formerly called Missouri v. Biden, has finally ended with a consent decree. It concerns whether the government may pressure social media companies to suppress speech in a way that would be illegal for the government to do itself. Although Justice Alito considered it “one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years,” the Court dismissed it for lack of standing (AAPS News, September 2024).
The decree (https://tinyurl.com/bdhhbxsc) sets a precedent that can be cited for future cases. It states that “modern technology does not alter the government’s obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment (https://tinyurl.com/36bjktsr).
Victory against ‘Sex Change’ Industry
In a settlement with Texas officials, Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) has agreed to open the country’s first Detransition Clinic, pay $10 million, and fire five physicians over its secretive illegal “transition” procedures. The hospital was allegedly falsifying medical records with fake diagnoses to collect Medicaid payments. These practices were brought to light by whistleblower surgeon Eithan Haim. The Justice Dept. indicted Dr. Haim for alleged privacy violations, but the charges were dropped (https://tinyurl.com/8afr8uyu).
Therapists Have Free Speech: Chiles v. Salazar
In an 8-to-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a 2019 Colorado statute barring “conversion therapy” was an “egregious assault” on free speech and the First Amendment (AAPS News, September 2025). Justice Elena Kagan said “the law prevents a therapist from saying she can help a minor change his same-sex orientation, but permits her to say that such a goal is impossible and so she will help him accept his gay identity.” The state thus suppresses one side of a debate while aiding another. The decision has implications for 20 states (tinyurl.com/4ve2es89).
Tip of the Month. The National Practitioner Data Bank posts online aggregate information about its database. Adverse action reports against physicians increased sharply annually until about 2010, after which it leveled off at about 50,000 per year for a total of roughly 750,000 adverse reports since then. The biggest decline occurred during the first year of COVID, in 2020, when hospitals may have realized how much they need physicians. There is no reason to feel isolated and ostracized upon learning that you have an adverse report against you in the Data Bank, because this official online tool shows you are far from alone: https://www.npdb.hrsa.gov/analysistool/. A Data Bank entry continues to have a devastating effect in some specialties, and is best avoided to the extent possible.
Correspondence
100,000 Canadians Euthanized. A bladder infection may be lethal in Canada, and not due to sepsis. The death toll from euthanasia approaches 100,000. Safeguards are clearly not working. One woman probably just had a bladder infection. The promised urine test was not done because she had already signed the papers (https://tinyurl.com/y5zz3nhu).
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Eden, N.Y.
Transparency Forces Response. A patient in Georgia was quoted $40,000 for a procedure. At the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, the price was $3,600 all-in. When the patient considered traveling, his local hospital matched the price. The patient stayed home and still saved $36,000. This is no anomaly.
G. Keith Smith, M.D., Oklahoma City, OK
Freedom from Health Insurance. For catastrophic coverage, I use HealthAccessSolutions.com. It started for self-funded employers but has expanded to individuals and families. It is similar to health sharing ministries.
Michael Ciampi, M.D., South Portland, ME
Central Planning and Fragility. Central planning is the epitome of ultra-fragility. A handful of bureaucrats in Moscow, Havana, or Caracas pretend to replace the millions of decentralized decisions, prices, and failed experiments generated by a market. The system is designed to be predictable, homogeneous, and “scientific.” Result: zero redundancy, zero skin in the game (the planner doesn’t go bankrupt for mistakes), and maximum dependence on nothing going wrong. When the black swan arrives, the house of cards collapses with a crash.
Cuba con H de Orthographía, https://tinyurl.com/ykkuvs4m
Optimizing Failure. Today’s economy is optimized for profit and efficiency and is highly centralized. Everything that increases survivability and flexibility increases costs and reduces profits. The majority of systems we rely on for life’s essentials are now digitally dependent with tight boundary conditions. Unlike analog systems, which are more forgiving, digital components have no replacements except the same exact part. Things work perfectly until some critical component in a dependency chain fails, and then the entire system fails.
Charles Hugh Smith, https://tinyurl.com/4dmbzj5k
Rationing Food to Nursing Homes. For the sake of earth’s climate, nursing home residents in Copenhagen are allowed to have only 80 grams of beef per week (tinyurl.com/7yyjs92r). The typical Dane consumes 400 g of beef per week.
Willie Soon, Ph.D., Salem, MA
Bonfire of the Inanities. The NY Times recently produced the infamous 35-minute video “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I? Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” Regurgitating the sentiments of America’s growing number of economic and moral ignoramuses and avant-garde revolutionaries, the video justifies theft and even violence to get even with The Man and The System, such as the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Heather Mac Donald writes: “When future archeologists seek to date the moment that the demise of the West became inevitable, this artefact of peak decadence will be a strong contender” (tinyurl.com/2h46ecc9).
The video expresses “a worldview that gives the selfish, the greedy, the mediocre, and the lazy permission to prey on others and to justify that predation in righteous terms. More theft and more death will follow.” It doesn’t bode well that university assembly lines are mass producing such self-absorbed blockheads.
Craig Cantoni, Tucson, AZ
Comintern, Continued. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) took up where Stalin’s Comintern left off, as Jack Cashill explains (https://tinyurl.com/ycy537uj). Stalin wanted the world to see America as a “stew of racist and xenophobic injustice.” For more than 30 years, SPLC has been fomenting racial division and then raising money allegedly to stop it.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
A Free Speech Victory? In the consent decree in Murthy, the CDC, CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), and the Surgeon General agree not to “threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment…unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content” that contains “protected free speech.” That is akin to a civilian signing an agreement not to steal his neighbor’s car; it “prohibits” something that is already illegal under black-letter First Amendment law. And it only lasts “for a period of 10 years.” After that, the agreement implies that CISA can return to its practice of “switchboarding.” Moreover, the only people who can enforce the terms are the five remaining plaintiffs.
The history of the Action reveals that the Supreme Court forfeited a generational opportunity to protect American free speech. Yet, as plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty comments, the 20,000 pages of documents obtained on discovery show the scope and workings of the government’s Censorship-Industrial Complex.
Robert W. Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/2k4y5vez
