On September 11, 2001, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers ended America’s sense of invulnerability. Other nations had experienced foreign invasions. America was shielded by two vast oceans. In the initial shock, no one knew whether additional attacks would quickly follow.
Americans quickly came together, and messages of support poured in from overseas. Banners proclaiming “God bless America” flew on NYC streets and across America.
The heroism of Americans was on proud display. Firefighters, law enforcement, and first responders selflessly risked life and limb. Less-celebrated ordinary civilians accomplished the largest water evacuation in history, greater than Dunkirk. About 800 mariners on some 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours, in response to a Coast Guard lieutenant who keyed a radio in New York Harbor asking for “all available boats” (https://tinyurl.com/mu59akd7).
Medical students and residents headed for the scene, collecting donated food from restaurants like Wendy’s, and manned first-aid stations. Many volunteers participated in rescue efforts that found few survivors in the rubble.
The lives of bereaved family members and wounded or sickened responders or bystanders were forever changed. And so were the lives of all Americans. The USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) was signed into law on Oct 26, 2001. The law permits greatly enhanced surveillance of all Americans, with roving wiretaps, “sneak and peek” searches, and easier access to sensitive personal records held by financial institutions, credit card companies, internet service providers, and libraries. The 130-page bill, which amended 15 federal laws, was rushed through without extensive hearings. It paved the way for the Dept. of Homeland Security and numerous laws that undermine constitutional freedoms that were previously taken for granted.
Unity Destroyed; Priorities Inverted
The solidarity shown after 9/11 did not last long. In many neighborhoods, American flags were replaced by the “rainbow LGBT flags,” and Old Glory was seen as a “symbol of hate.”
In 2019 leftist streamer Hasan Piker, popular with some young Democrat activists, said that America deserved 9/11. To some, the deplorable consequence of 9/11 is Islamophobia, not dead Americans.Anti-American sentiment permeates university campuses. For example, on the 25th anniversary, a memorial at California State University Stanislaus to 2,977 innocent Americans was vandalized with pro-Palestine and Antifa messages (https://tinyurl.com/yyfasejh).
But perhaps worse than the political divisiveness is the chasm between government and the people. Americans are now suspects first, citizens second (tinyurl.com/2s3d2s59). Grandmothers need to be patted down and x-rayed at least as much as young males dressed as activists, to avoid accusations of discrimination, racial profiling, or the dreaded Islamophobia.
Would we be safer if the $12 billion budget for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were spent surveilling noncitizens professing a hostile, violent ideology? The presumed hijackers—who are not available for criminal prosecution—were Saudi citizens here on an expired visa. Procedures at the American consulate were extremely lax (https://tinyurl.com/2fu859z7). Victims’ family members are still in court trying to prove Saudi complicity (tinyurl.com/ytvn4k2w).
Questions about how the attack happened (it was officially the work of Osama bin Laden acting alone) and the independent investigations are “conspiracy theory.”
Health Effects and MAHA
The 9/11 attacks exposed thousands of individuals to environmental toxins and hazardous materials. The WTC Health Program was established in July 2011 for longitudinal care and surveillance of disaster-exposed populations (tinyurl.com/2n8uxj3j)– with disappointingly little thought beyond standard concerns.
In the massive, unprecedented environmental disaster, skyscrapers were mostly “dustified.” The pile of rubble accounted for only a fraction of the concrete, insulation, fireproofing, sheetrock, furniture, carpeting, etc. “Forever chemicals,” particulate matter, and microplastics, which concern MAHA greatly in barely detectable quantities, were in thick layers of dust on the streets, and in the lungs of everyone in the area and downwind.
Where are the research protocols in the numerous prestigious institutions in New York City to follow the thousands of patients harboring these poisons? Is tissue being collected, from biopsies or post-mortems, to examine the effects? Evidently not.
What Lessons Must We Learn?
Reading aloud the names of those who perished is fitting, but more important is to ask whether they died in vain. The leftist response showed the intention of demolishing the American system. Not an effort to correct its flaws, but to abolish, destroy, and replace.
Globalism and its allies (Islam and Communism) intend destruction.The enemies are patriotic Americans—the real subjects of pervasive surveillance under cover of seeking boxcutters. Our military and intelligence failed to protect us—nothing has been done to punish the guilty. Little is done to guard against a less obvious, spuriously “peaceful” invasion by aliens hostile to our culture. Or to restore our institutions taken over by anti-American ideology. Or to restore our vision as builders.
‘Democracy’s Greatest Threat’
In an Apr 21, 2022, keynote address at a symposium titled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm,” former President Barack Obama stated that the free flow of information had become democracy’s greatest vulnerability. The solution, in Obama’s telling, was for technology companies to “redesign” themselves under government oversight. Content moderation, he said, does not go far enough.
Obama did not precisely answer how disinformation would be defined, but the European Commission has, writes Robert Malone, M.D. (https://tinyurl.com/2fdfnfxc).
A 160-page document by the staff of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee references thousands of pages of internal corporate communications, produced under congressional subpoena from ten of the world’s largest technology companies, documenting in meticulous, damning detail how officials of the European Commission spent a decade quietly pressuring Silicon Valley to silence speech they didn’t like: Speech about immigration, COVID-19, gender ideology, and election integrity.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed in 2022, is the world’s most sophisticated censorship machine. Content removal requests must be fast-tracked by platforms. Non-compliant companies face fines of up to 6% percent of their global annual revenue, which could run to billions of dollars. In 2023, platforms reportedly censored statements including “there are only two genders” as hate speech under Commission pressure.
Companies do not maintain country-specific content moderation systems. Users travel. The DSA exports European speech standards to the entire world, including America.
The DSA researcher-access provision, as enforced in the Commission’s December 2025 fine against X, asserts the right to demand that an American company hand over data on American users to researchers approved by European regulators. This is an extraordinary extraterritorial claim over American citizens’ private information, made by an unelected foreign bureaucracy.
Brussels is concerned about populist insurgency over mass migration, economic stagnation, and elite condescension. Voters were flocking to parties the press described as “far right,” which in most cases simply held views that had been mainstream a generation earlier. “The platforms, with their algorithmic indifference to editorial gatekeepers, were giving these movements a megaphone that bypassed state broadcasters and legacy newspapers.”
The Commission denies that its “election integrity work” constitutes “partisan interference.”
Dr. Malone states that this is fifth-generation warfare. It erases the boundary between war and peace. The primary battlefield is the human mind. “The target is not an enemy army but an enemy population’s capacity to perceive reality clearly, to form coherent political judgments, and to act collectively on its own interests…. Victory is achieved…when the enemy population can no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, friend from foe, or its own interests from those of its adversaries.”
Dr. Malone urges all to read the primary documents, whatever they think of the Trump administration, Jim Jordan, or Elon Musk.
The question is whether one believes unelected foreign officials—or even elected Americans—should have that power at all.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” John Adams, Dec 17, 1814
ACTION OF THE MONTH
Does your practice welcome direct-pay patients? Please make sure you are on our list to help patients find you. https://aaps.pub/listing
The Sanders ‘Superintelligence’ Ban
On Sep 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, “to stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control,” according to a Sanders press release (https://tinyurl.com/2xcxv656).
“The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs.” The bill would “establish a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence, including by enforcing a prohibition on artificial superintelligence.” For violations, “entities shall be subject to the corporate death penalty, and persons shall be subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties [for] unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.”
Democratic Socialist Sanders would legislate the power to summarily seize the property of certain billionaire oligarchs (e.g., Elon Musk), but apparently not Bill Gates.
Anthropic’s alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, put the probability of AI killing humanity within the next decade at greater than 10%. The real reason for panic, however, seems to be open-weight models that can be downloaded, modified, and run independently. These have created one of the few areas of AI in which individuals, universities, small companies, and independent researchers can work without access to billions of dollars in capital and enormous proprietary computing clusters. The goal of Anthropic is not safety, but regulatory capture.
The same legislation is proposed in the UK.Seventy British parliamentarians have demanded a worldwide ban.
The bill (like the PATRIOT Act) had already been written and was ready when a “policy window” opened.
The bill will not stop open-weight models already released by Chinese companies that can be downloaded, copied, modified, and run outside China. They cannot be recalled. They are already distributed across servers and computers around the world, including in the U.S.
Bernie’s Act would protect America’s largest AI corporations, weaken independent developers, and cede more of the open-model market to China (https://tinyurl.com/mtwtam28). (See p 3)
Henry Ford Declines to Discuss Vaccine Study
At the Michigan House Oversight Subcommittee on Child Welfare System hearing on Henry Ford Health’s unpublished vaccinated-vs.-completely-unvaccinated birth-cohort study, Henry Ford declined to appear. The largest and most comprehensive such study to date looked at long-term chronic disease outcomes in a longitudinal birth cohort of 18,468 children, including 16,500 vaccinated children and 2,000 completely unvaccinated children. Vaccinated children had roughly a 2.5-times higher risk of a chronic health condition. Senior author Dr. Marcus Zervos did not want to publish for fear of being fired (https://tinyurl.com/mrxb9an3).
AAPS Calendar
Sep 24-26, 2026. 83rd Annual Meeting, Alpharetta, GA
AI Is a First-Amendment Fight
In 1791, when the First Amendment was ratified, the printing press was a physical machine that a citizen could own, operate, and modify. Anyone with the capital to buy the type, ink, and paper could publish. The Free Press Clause—the words: “or of the press”—existed specifically to prevent the federal government from deciding who was allowed to own one (https://tinyurl.com/4zremu73).
The Founders had experienced the 1662 Licensing of the Press Act in England under which the Crown decided which printers could operate, which manuscripts required a license to publish, and which subjects were beyond permitted discussion.
Restore the First points out that “compute” is speech infrastructure. It is comparable to the printing press, through which speech was composed, replicated, and distributed at scale in the 18th century. Every act of American speech now runs through it. And so does every other pillar of the First Amendment: religion, press, assembly, and petition.
The censorship we are experiencing now is output-side The regime being built right now, through the Sanders bill, is input-side. If two or three federally licensed corporations are the only entities legally permitted to build the AI mediation layer, then the layer through which every future American composes speech will already be filtered before the citizen types a word. Controlling the mediation layer is prior restraint.
The most instructive single actor to watch in the AI regulatory push is Bill Gates, according to Restore the First. He holds four positions: funder / warner / regulator-advocate / deployer. He pledged $1 billion for AI at the Goalkeepers 2026 event and told Reuters that governments must move faster.
Speech infrastructure—whether it be a physical press, AI, or whatever comes next, must be unconditionally protected.
AAPS Files Amicus Opposing Abortion by Mail
In the wake of Dobbs, a number of states passed laws restricting or forbidding abortion. FDA bureaucrats effectively overrode state laws by permitting mail-order dispensing of mifepristone.
Louisiana objected, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the FDA’s removal of the in-person requirements, by which the FDA was facilitating people sharing the abortion pill with those not having a prescription for it.
Danco Laboratories immediately applied for a stay of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, claiming that the in-person dispensing requirement would lead to nationwide chaos, and might cause the company to be unable to operate since mifepristone is its only product. The Supreme Court ultimately stayed the Fifth Circuit’s stay, allowing people to continue to access mifepristone by mail and at pharmacies as the case proceeds.
In its amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court opposing the stay and the FDA’s policy, AAPS writes that “severe interference with federalism by the FDA is contrary to Dobbs, and unsustainable for our nation” (https://tinyurl.com/mr2jhy7s).
As a result of the FDA’s action, there has been a significant increase in abortions in the U.S. Due to removal of the in-person requirements, more abortions are performed today without informed consent.
Ongoing cases in Texas and Missouri could protect the unborn by directing the FDA to withdraw its approval of mifepristone altogether (https://tinyurl.com/3ubnjvc7).
RFRA Does Not Protect Vaccine Exemptions
In 2022, parents brought a lawsuit (Spillane v. Lamont) challenging Connecticut’s removal of the religious exemption to vaccination. (https://tinyurl.com/mudsh5kn). The only claim that survived was the allegation that the state violated its 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) when it eliminated the religious exemption the year before. In May 2026, Democratic Party lawmakers passed an amendment to the religious freedom statute that bars vaccine requirements pertaining to public and private schools from the protections of religious freedom included in the RFRA. So, a Connecticut Superior Court judge dismissed the case (https://tinyurl.com/3a4k6wyv).
Legislators and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong celebrated the dismissal. Plaintiff’s attorney Lindy R. Urso stated: “There is no triumph in watching the most powerful political actors in Connecticut place the full weight of the government boot upon the necks of families, force those families to fight for years merely to obtain judicial review, and then—when victory is in sight—press the boot down one final time by changing the law” (ibid.).
Contracts with Pfizer and Moderna
When the U.S. government purchased COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, it contractually agreed to keep the PREP Act immunity in place for as long as their vaccines are administered in the U.S., writes Aaron Siri (https://tinyurl.com/3x389f98).
This means that the U.S. government promised that they could not be sued for harms from their COVID-19 vaccines even if the emergency ended. But Pfizer and Moderna could sue the U.S. government for breach of contract if PREP Act immunity is terminated before U.S. use of their COVID-19 vaccines ceases.
Moreover, it also guaranteed Pfizer and Moderna billions of dollars for this privilege—more than $21 billion just in the initial rollout. Immunity from product liability was guaranteed before the products were even developed, undermining any incentive for manufacturers to create a safer product. Then government required citizens to be injected with this product under the threat of grave consequences such as loss of employment.
Siri proposes the following: “No law may require or coerce a person to receive or use a medical product, or impose a penalty or deprive a benefit for refusing a medical product or refusing to disclose whether a person has received a medical product.”
Tip of the Month. AI is being used to initiate Medicare fraud investigations, and the Department of Justice vows that “your next whistleblower could be your data.” The federal government is even using travel data mined from the Department of Homeland Security in order to investigate Medicare providers, by comparing billing records with transit information. In the past, mistakes in billing dates have led to accusations of billing for services while the physician was out of the country. So-called “outliers” and high-volume Medicare participants are at the highest risk, even though an outlier may be someone who works particularly hard or is a specialist for an unusual medical condition. A reason for opting out of Medicare is to eliminate worry about being unjustly investigated for billing date errors or an unusual but honest medical practice. Increasingly physicians are using AI themselves to doublecheck their billing codes and notes, but beware of using AI as an unsupervised editor.
Correspondence
Impact of Physician Discipline. The financial impact of physician disciplinary actions is truly shocking. A first-of-its-kind study (https://tinyurl.com/3xeb9pdr) showed that income lost due to loss of certification/credentials exceeded $200,000 for most.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Eden, N.Y.
Dose Effects. The linear-no-threshold theory of toxicology has been used to create many regulations and public health policies that assume that carcinogenesis or toxic effect at high level means a toxic effect at any level. The MAHA people use this method to gin up fears that because of “forever chemicals” half the population is suffering from chronic disease, condemning modern agricultural methods that have increased food production and reduced famines and starvation. Things that are toxic or carcinogenic at high levels may not be so at ambient levels, and some (like radiation) might even be beneficial at low levels.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
Profiteering by Rationing Care. NEJM has given a new boost to the corporate practice of medicine (tinyurl.com/mvwwy78h). The author’s malignant conclusion: “Value-based health care offers a path forward by reconnecting system goals [not patient goals!] with professional purpose [i.e. power] and activating the intrinsic motivators of autonomy, competence, and relatedness [three bunk managed care PR tropes].” Keep this in mind: “Political language…is designed to make lies truthful and murder respectable…” [George Orwell, 1946]. We need our pending Medicaid Reform bill that will put the MN Medicaid managed-care hegemony out of business.
Robert Geist, M.D. North Oaks, MN
Constitutional Architecture. The separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power was Montesquieu’s most consequential contribution. James Madison read Montesquieu closely; parts of the Federalist Papers are essentially Montesquieu. Every check, balance, veto, and independent court flows from one insight: the most reliable protection against the abuse of power is a system in which power constrains power. Not virtue. Not good intentions. Structure. He understood that liberty is not the absence of government but the product of the right kind of government. Rousseau wanted a virtuous government. Montesquieu wanted a system in which government’s virtue was largely irrelevant because its structure constrained it regardless. One requires “philosopher-kings.” The other requires architects. The architects won in Philadelphia. The philosopher-kings won in Paris. The administrative state is the inversion of Montesquieu’s architecture: power concentrated, institutions captured, courts politicized, and executives expanding into every space legislatures vacate.
Krzysztof Szczawinski, https://tinyurl.com/kht6wdnm
Fauci Hearings. What America saw in the Senate hearings of Anthony Fauci is the end state of the toxic paternalism of an incompetent bureaucracy. The numerous discrepancies between Fauci’s diary entries and his public statements were not merely attempts at self-protection or a cover-up of his earlier disastrous decisions; they reflect the standard model of public health administration: we know better than you how to manage a pandemic, and in fact we know it so well that we refuse to discuss any of it and instead use censorship and smear of contrary expertise and coercion rather than persuasion to effect our policies.
CDC reported that by the end of 2023, in spite of all of these policies and in spite of the massive population vaccination by the COVID-19 vaccines, more than 87% of American adults had been infected anyway. That fact is the proof that the public health institutional pandemic management was a failure. And still, Fauci and the rest of the public health infrastructure maintain the utter conceit that they know how to do their job.
Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., Yale School of Public Health
Barbarians inside the Gates. The Democratic Socialists of America have vowed to destroy the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and all our founding principles. We must remember that all told, communists have killed an estimated 150 million civilians. The body count is still rising. No matter how many times and how many different places Marxist ideology is tried, the results are always the same: Forced labor camps, concentration camps, persecution, and genocide. Socialism and communism predictably lead to poverty, repression, violence and poor living conditions.
Elizabeth Smoots, https://tinyurl.com/4vnx8pz2
Freedom. The moment you opt out of Medicare and third-party payment restrictions by the cartel-no-longer-insurers, all that [rubbish] vanishes immediately. No coding, no billing, just “how much do I owe you, Doc?” Those moments were some of the best of my whole 50 years of outpatient care! Patients got it, every time, no matter what their socioeconomic background or capabilities were! And they did not want charity, free care as they were there because they had to choose you and value and respect you for what you had to do against the Cartels and government-controlled “care” to provide such an open, honest, and direct style of professional care. It is fixable, but ONLY by repealing and not replacing all health legislation since at least July 1965.
Donald Gehrig, M.D., St. Paul, MN
