Featured

Trump: Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader, but I said no thanks

Trump’s “Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader” joke at an NRCC fundraiser uses a real, deadly leadership crisis in Iran to normalize assassination-as-policy and blur what’s confirmed about the war and succession.

Mar 26, 2026

Featured

‘Men need to be perp-walked’ after Epstein files release, Massie tells BBC

A GOP lawmaker says the Epstein document releases are still falling short—because redactions and withheld material may be blocking accountability and survivor-centered justice.

Mar 25, 2026

Buried.News

The stories buried under the noise

Primary focus

Trump fires Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary

A Cabinet secretary was forced out amid contracting and oversight scrutiny, signaling that executive control—not transparent accountability—can dictate leadership of the agency driving mass detention and deportation.

Mar 5, 2026

Featured

The Trump gold coin is not normal : Consider This from NPR

A federal design panel OK’d a Trump portrait for a commemorative gold coin, but the key question is whether Treasury can legally bypass long-standing limits meant to keep living politicians off U.S. money.

Mar 23, 2026

Featured

White House Confronted Over Huge Bets Made Minutes Before Trump’s Big War Move

A $580 million burst of oil-futures selling minutes before Trump’s Iran “talks” post raises a basic public-interest question: did anyone trade on advance knowledge of a market-moving national security decision?

Mar 24, 2026

Norms Impact

RFK Jr.’s health department calls Nature “junk science,” cancels subscriptions

A federal health department moved to cut scientists off from mainstream journals and branded them “junk science,” setting a precedent for political control over what evidence our government can read.

Executive

Jul 1, 2025

Sources

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/07/rfk-jr-s-health-department-calls-nature-junk-science-cancels-subscriptions/

Summary

Multiple federal agencies have canceled contracts and subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, including Nature, cutting off scientists’ access to major scientific literature. Leadership within the Department of Health and Human Services framed the cancellations as ending “unused subscriptions to junk science,” aligning federal research access and publication policy with a top official’s public attacks on mainstream journals. The practical consequence is a government workforce less able to track current evidence and publish in high-impact venues, narrowing scientific freedom inside institutions tasked with protecting public health and national capabilities.

Reality Check

When a top federal health department labels leading scientific outlets “junk science” while terminating access across agencies, it normalizes political gatekeeping over the evidence our government is allowed to consult—and that erosion ultimately reaches our own healthcare, safety, and rights. Based on the described conduct, this looks less like a clean criminal fit and more like an abuse-of-office norm break: using institutional control over research infrastructure to punish disfavored information and steer federal science toward “in-house” venues. Even without a clear federal criminal hook on these facts, it advances a dangerous precedent of weaponizing procurement and publication pathways to suppress scientific freedom and reshape public institutions around ideology rather than verifiable evidence.

Media

Detail

Scientists at several federal agencies are losing access to scientific literature published by Springer Nature, including the journal Nature.

Spokespeople for NASA and the US Department of Agriculture confirmed that agency scientists would no longer have access to Springer Nature journals. A USDA spokesperson said it “has cancelled all contracts and subscriptions to Springer Nature,” describing the journals as “exorbitantly expensive” and “not a good use of taxpayer funds.” A government spending database also shows the Department of Energy has dropped contracts with the publisher.

After initial contact suggested the National Institutes of Health would retain access, Andrew Nixon, spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, later said: “All contracts with Springer Nature are terminated or no longer active,” adding that taxpayer dollars “should be [sic] not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science.” HHS oversees NIH.

The cancellations follow HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s May 27 podcast comments calling leading medical journals “corrupt” and stating the government would “stop NIH scientists from publishing there” and create “in-house” journals.

Norms Impact

Elon Musk Loses It After Astronaut Dares Calls Out His Lie

A powerful contractor CEO turned a routine ISS return schedule into a partisan accusation—then used personal insults to bully an astronaut who insisted on operational facts.

Media & Narrative

Feb 20, 2025

Sources

https://newrepublic.com/post/191782/elon-musk-loses-astronaut-dares-calls-lie

Summary

Elon Musk publicly insulted Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen after Mogensen called Musk’s claim about “political” abandonment of ISS astronauts a lie. A private-sector executive used a mass platform to reframe a routine spaceflight schedule dispute as partisan sabotage while asserting direct access to the White House-level decision chain. The practical consequence is a public-information environment where operational facts are drowned out by personalized attacks and politicized narratives that corrode trust in institutions and expertise.

Reality Check

Weaponizing public distrust by asserting, without substantiation, that the government deliberately endangered astronauts for politics normalizes a corrosive precedent: national safety decisions become just another partisan smear, and our right to reliable public information collapses under performative outrage. On these facts, this reads less like a prosecutable offense and more like a brutal violation of governance norms—using platform power to intimidate a witness to the underlying reality and to pressure public officials through a manufactured crisis narrative. No clear federal crime is established here absent proof of a knowing scheme to defraud or coerce, but the conduct tracks the familiar architecture of abuse-of-influence: delegitimization, personal attack, and insinuated backchannel control over public decisions.

Media

View media post

Detail

On Thursday, astronaut Andreas Mogensen responded on X to Elon Musk repeating on Fox News that the Biden administration stranded astronauts on the International Space Station for “political reasons.” Mogensen wrote, “What a lie,” and criticized Musk’s complaints about media honesty.

Musk replied on X with an insult and claimed SpaceX “could have brought them back several months ago,” stating he “offered this directly to the Biden administration” and that the return was delayed for political reasons. Mogensen answered that the return plan has been Crew-9 since last September and that the astronauts are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on the ISS since last September, adding that Musk was not sending a rescue ship.

Astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams told CNN the prior week, “We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck,” and asked that rhetoric and narrative be changed. The trip extension for Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore was attributed to technical difficulties.