Steve’s Newsletter 1(8)
Charlie Kirk’s Last “Debate”
I’ve had my ear to the ground on the post-Tea Party right-wing movement for years; as such, I kind of took it for granted that Charlie Kirk was a household name. Afterall, he’s got millions of followers and billions of views on YouTube, Tik Tok, and other sources. Yet when I began posting on Facebook about his assassination, a fair number of people (usually boomers) claimed to have never heard of him. So, it follows that well-intentioned people who aren’t familiar with Kirk’s methods will say something like “at least he was engaging with the other side” or “at least he was keeping dialogue open.”
Oh, my sweet winter child, no. Charlie Kirk did not engage with the other side in any meaningful way. He used cheap rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies to achieve dominance over unskilled college kids. The red herring was one of his prized tactics and he was an expert. His last “debate” we see him at his finest in his final two sentences.
To understand his final conversation, we need to all be on the same page. Since the August 27, 2025 mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church, there has been a steady drumbeat among the right wing punditry and politicians to target the Second Amendment rights of transgender people. Kirk has been part of that drumbeat which reached a fever pitch earlier this month when it was announced that the Trump DOJ was researching ways to declare all transgender individuals “mentally defective” in order to restrict the right to bear arms.[1]
With Kirk elevating attention to the transgender shooting, we see the subject of the last debate in the transcript below. The first speaker is a student named Hunter Kozak.
Kozak: So, do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?
Kirk: Too many.
[Cheering]
Kozak: It’s five. Five is a lot. I’m going to give you credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?
Kirk: Counting or not counting gang violence?
It was here that the gunshot interrupted the conversation.
The point of the line of questioning by the student (as noted in subsequent interviews) was to pin Kirk down on the statistical anomaly of a transgender perpetrator. Kirk, who has big opinions on transgender shooters apparently did not have a ready statistic which when juxtaposed with the overall number showing that transgender shooters are statistical outliers, something that most experts on the subject of mass shootings in the United States readily agree on.[2] So, he said “too many.” The purpose of asking about the total number of mass shootings in the last 10 years is that they number in the THOUSANDS and “too many” transgender perpetrators comes to about 0.1 percent of all mass shoots. The vitriol is misplaced when considering that approximately 1 percent of the US population identifies as transgender.[3] Or if you don’t math very well, the percentage of the US population that is transgender is ten times the percentage of transgender mass shooting perpetrators.
Kirk didn’t want to deal with numbers that are inconvenient to his narrative that transgender people are mentally ill and should have their freedoms constrained. So, he punted by asking about gang violence. This is important, not as a racist dog whistle but because GANG VIOLENCE IS TRACKED SEPARATELY FROM MASS SHOOTING VIOLENCE. Don’t believe me? Here’s a link to a Congressional Research Service paper on the subject; the line you need is on second page.[4]
The thing is, Kirk knew this, but with a friendly crowd, he can use “gang violence” as a dog whistle to get the crowd on his side and then splice the video for a share on social media to show him “owning a lib.” This is what’s called a “red herring” logical fallacy. A red herring uses something irrelevant to the current dialogue to derail the conversation. You could also call it moving the goal post in an argument, because once you start responding to the red herring, he can lead you along by the nose until you forget why you came up to ask a question to begin with.
Kirk was a master of this cheap rhetorical trick. Along with him are other darlings of the far right such as Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, and the folks at Prager U.
Haven’t heard of any of those? You should probably spend some time going down an internet rabbit hole because they are the ones continuing to lead the narrative behind closed doors.
[1] Trump DOJ is looking at ways to ban transgender Americans from owning guns, sources say, Evan Perez and Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN, September 4, 2025 https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/04/politics/transgender-firearms-justice-department-second-amendment
[2] No, there is not an ‘epidemic’ of shootings by trans people, Will Carless, USA Today, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/29/shooting-minnesota-school-transgender-online-untruths/85876291007/
[3] What percentage of the US population is transgender?, USA Facts, February 12, 2025, https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-the-us-population-is-transgender/
[4] Public Mass Shootings in the United States: Selected Implications for Federal Public Health and Safety Policy, Bagalman, Erin et al., Congressional Research Service, April 16, 2013, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R43004
Zeus Sat Down
If you’ve read much of my writing, you will know there is a fair bit of underlying trauma fueling my creativity. Sometimes it’s nice and other times it’s difficult to get through the day. My life was changed once when a good friend gave me a bar of “magic mushroom” chocolate. The underlying chemical was actually dimethyltryptamine (DMT) rather than the more commonly known psilocybin that is in a few species of wild mushrooms.
I began experimenting with microdosing, first one square, then two, and then five. Five was my limit after an interesting conversation with a parked car in Port Townsend, Washington. Ever since then, I have used the microdosing as a useful tool to combat the fight or flight response that comes with the overstimulation of modern society. DMT doesn’t make me check out like alcohol but to fully check in. I see more, feel more, and experience more.
With that limited, microdose experience, some stories from other people, and some well-placed advertisements compliment of internet algorithms, I decided to try out an ayahuasca retreat. Ayahuasca comes from processing the caapi vine, one of numerous species of plants all over the world to contain DMT. While one could get the same effect from a species of acacia plant in Australia, ayahuasca is associated with certain religious ceremonies of several dozen Amazonian tribes.
Ayahuasca is a legal gray area. Many countries have a complete ban not only on the chemical DMT but on cultivating the plants containing it. Other places such as the United States tolerate the cultivation of the plants but possession of a refined product would run afoul of Schedule 1. Some places have no law in place affecting DMT but would go after “healers” for practicing medicine without a license after doling out completely unscientific amounts of the medicine. With that legal caveat in place, I will refrain from mentioning the specific country I visited, and all people have been anonymized.
I arrived after a long flight and bus ride to the remnants of an old olive grove. By old, I mean some of the trees were planted before Columbus was born. Yet these are young when considering that the trees regularly live beyond 1,000 years of age. There are figs and almonds too—fig trees so large you can climb on them. It is a dry Mediterranean climate, so being among these trees felt rather magical. I arrived at 5:30 PM and the first ceremony was at 7 PM, so I got a rushed tour of amenities including a small concrete pool that I believe is not treated, pit toilets, showers, a dining area, and the ceremonial space. While ayahuasca is a distinctly Amazonian tradition, the place has a hodgepodge feel of various spiritualities including imagery of Buddha, Christ, and other things. Had I looked up in a tree and seen a dreamcatcher, it would have not surprised me.
Before the ceremony is a fairly long safety briefing that discussed the medicines used, the importance of keeping to our own space during the ceremony and the strict limitation on cell phones in the ceremonial space. (Notebooks were okay.) We would have two rounds of ayahuasca, access to a tobacco powder called rapé (pronounced hepay), and one dose of eyedrops called sananga. The rapé was supposed to help refine the effects of the ayahuasca and the ibogaine in the sananga was supposed to help us see with clarity and to open our third eye. (See the aforementioned hodgepodge of religious beliefs that allow the Asian tradition of third eye to sit alongside a distinctly Amazonian rite.) Both the tobacco and eye drops were optional but encouraged.
Emphasis was placed on beginning and ending the ceremony together. While we could leave the tent to get fresh air or look at the stars, it was understood that if we left for too long we would be gently herded back to our seats. We were also warned that the reaction of the drug could be both very dark and very light but that neither effect would last a long time. Just wait and the worm will turn.
The ceremony officially begins with a cleansing of burning herbs that smell like sage and something else I can’t quite place. I would grow sick of the smell of sage by the end of the evening, but in that moment it was pleasant. Some kind of blessing was given with feathers that lightly touched my entire body and then I went inside a large canvas dome on a geodesic metal frame.
Being the second in the door, I tried out several locations based on what I perceived to be good for me. Would the drums be too loud? Maybe I should sit further away. There is an opening to the tent here which might give me fresh air, but the temperature drops rapidly in this desert climate; it might be cold. This tent flap is loose and I know if it touches me it will annoy me. Yet later I would fall in love with the texture of the flapping tent canvas.
Men were on stage left and women on stage right. I don’t know if this has a specific ceremonial purpose or merely to reduce the likelihood of sexual harassment. Perhaps both. Through coincidence we were equally divided by sex. A total of 34 people in the tent including 28 guests and six healers. In the middle was a fire ring set into the concrete pad and the top of the tent was open to let smoke escape. I get the perception that this group was larger than usual because those sitting toward the dais were on mattresses and those toward the entrance were only on blankets. Yet the lead woman, spoke of an event with 50 people. I am thankful to have had a mattress for the fact that I would spend so much of the ceremony face down in it.
After everyone settled in, we each said our name and stated our intention. There were no rules to this. My intention was “to get outside myself” which is a complaint from my wife on a regular basis—a perception that my pain runs so deep that I can’t see others, only their effect on me. Some intentions ran over a minute. Then we stood up and held hands to say a little prayer about our group purpose of finding kindness and love for our self and others. (I am paraphrasing heavily because it went on for several minutes.) Special emphasis was placed on our left hand facing up and our right hand facing down. The gentleman on my right had a very warm hand compared to the one on my left whose hand was cold.
Finally, at long last we were given our shot glasses of ayahuasca. It had the consistency of sorghum molasses and tasted as such, though there was a vile bitterness behind the sweetness that made many people gag. We were encouraged to clean the shot glass with our fingers out of respect for the process and difficulty of getting the medicine. I made a good faith effort to have my glass completely clean and noted with some dismay the residue on the glasses of others.
As with microdosing, I don’t feel anything at first and then the DMT comes in suddenly with a wooshing sound. The whole world closes in and I see only what is in front of me. In this case, a candle-lined dais with the staff gently playing music. In the low yellow light, the head lady named Stephanie looked like the Pumpkin Spice Latte lady (absurd YouTube video for reference.) I laughed at this and hoped that she wouldn’t turn into an actual pumpkin. Then I noticed that the floor had lit up in brilliant pulsating colors and stared at them fascinated by how pretty they were.
The medicine acts in waves; about the time I notice that the floor is a pulsating mass of kaleidoscope colors, I notice that I haven’t looked up in a while and the colors vanish, leaving me with beautiful dancing women and the slow beat of a drum. I wanted to take notes, but more often than not, I forgot how to open my notebook. By the time I had it open, my thoughts had shifted. On the rare occasions I could actually write, I was more fascinated by the ink flowing out of the end of the pen than what I had to write. That itself seemed noteworthy, so I wrote it down.
“Wathing the ink come out of the pen is magnifiant.” (sic).
Single sentences take up entire pages of my little Moleskine notebook; thankfully it is unlined so I have the freedom to do whatever I want including doodling a little sun in the corner of one page. Sentences sometimes get so big that they flow onto the next page.
“It comes in waves…”
“… so quickly that…”
“… I get lost in them.”
“I…”
“I…”
Sentences that begin with I no longer work. Is this the death of ego that people talk about? I think of my wife and write that, “Lauren is a warm hug.” My last coherent note is me saying it is okay to be silent.
My mind wondered from Lauren to other lovers and back again—those I harmed and those who harmed me and those who were just yoked unequally and doomed to failure to begin with. A close friend is waiting on me to tell her about the ceremony but there is no internet available in the encampment and she will worry. I resolve to ask Lauren to message her because I can still get text messages out.
Then I began the low moaning of “no.” This would go on for what must have been 90 minutes, though I did not have a watch. In my mind, I was making up for a lifetime of “no” left unsaid. No to child abuse. No to authoritarian teachers. No to obligations. No to distractions that take me from the things and people I love. It became its own chant rising and falling with the music, going to deep octaves that seemed to emanate from my groin and exceeded my normal vocal range. Then rising in pitch slowly with the music, chanting “no, no. no-no-no-no. NOOOO. Nooo… nOOOO….,” n unison with the Spanish songs I didn’t always understand.
There is no accounting for what is seen and how one will react. I broke from my moans to see my neighbor stand up and it occurred to me that he was the Roman God, Zeus. I reached out and called to him.
“Zeus, I see you!”
Did I actually say that or just think it? If I said it out loud, he didn’t hear me or ignored me. In actuality, Zeus is a mere mortal named Colin and he lives in London. In that moment he was Zeus and I am glad he was next to me. Then he sat down and I was saddened by this. I cried out that Zeus had fallen. I wanted to help him up but was reminded of our briefing that we keep to our own space. But I was consoled with the words of the philosopher Samuel Johnson. The actual quote is “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” The paraphrase in my mind was that “man behaves like a beast to get rid of the pain of being a man.” Would gods be any different? It’s hard work to be a god. They need a break too. Why else would Zeus dress up like an animal to fornicate with mortals? So, Zeus had not fallen. He merely took a break.
After Zeus sat down, I spent some time watching Ellen, a German filmmaker who came to the retreat to tear down her matrilineal intergenerational trauma and to break that cycle. She spoke of some of this in private, and I will only say that the Holocaust and her relatives’ participation in it weighs heavily on her.
Then I vomited. This is normal. They call it purging. I vomited up remnants of my lunch and then I vomited residue from the ayahuasca concentrate. Then I vomited up other things from deep inside of me. Metaphysical things. I cannot explain this. We are provided buckets for this purpose and whenever a bucket gets soiled, it is replaced with a new one by staff. The buckets are blue plastic with a metal handle. A label on the side notes that they are “made of 100 percent recyclable material” and “100 percent recyclable.” The redundancy made me laugh for some reason. Then I vomited again.
The rapé ceremony involved a long pipe shaped like a snake. It was here that I recalled a numerology lesson at the beginning of the evening. One of the healers noted that 2025 is a year of 9 and that 9 is associated with the tree serpent who slithers through time and space and knows all. Numerology strikes me as bollocks, but I enjoyed the snake pipe touching me on the forehead, chest, stomach, and each shoulder. Then I held my breath as John breathed into his end of the pipe and blasted the rapé into my left nostril. It burned. It burned as badly as the time I took the lid off a bottle of K-Mart brand ammonia as a kid. I fell to the ground and writhed in agony, shaking and sneezing uncontrollably. I couldn’t bear to complete the second half to be sent up my right nostril. John, with his kind blue eyes and bangs he clearly cuts himself held my shoulder and said, “you can.” I consented and took the second blast which doesn’t hurt nearly as bad. I am unaccustomed to tobacco, having never smoked cigarettes and only occasionally dabbling in cigars, the last one sometime in early 2018. I am unable to stand and instead crawled back to my mattress. At least one other person declined the rapé because of my antics. I of course vomited again as one does when given an extreme dose of nicotine.
The sananga ceremony consists of lying on the back as a gel sort of eyedrop is placed on the eye lid. Then you blink and it enters the eye, burning like a mild case of conjunctivitis. I rub and rub and rub, knuckles into my eyelids and as I look up, my smooshed eyeballs are crossed and I see a blurry double-vision across the tent. Is the third eye just corneal trauma?
The second, lower dose of ayahuasca was given and my body recoils like it is being offered a second bottle of magnesium citrate before a colonoscopy. It knows this poison now and rebels against my hands and lips that would dare give it to it again. It stays down only a minute or two while I go outside to refill my water bottle. I then decorate the base of a cactus with whatever else is left in my GI tract, not much as I mostly dry heaved.
From here was more music and drumming as we slowly wound down the night. Everything was in Spanish and I got the gist of hearts and paths and compassion and medicina. The chanting is cathartic, as chanting tends to be. It would not have mattered had we switched from cúra medicina, medicina cúra” to “hare krishna, krishna hare.” Hell, if a high school evangelical had wondered in to “sing of your love forever” in progressively rising key changes, he would have fit right in.
Despite having seen god and being made wobbly in the knees by tobacco, as the ceremony wound down, well after midnight, I note that my cynical side is still present. At some point the chanting was enough and I just wanted to return to my room. Like a Taylor Swift song that should have stopped a minute ago but she’s got to say the same line five more times, the chanting just went on. I am done, but Ellen is still going, writhing like a snake, her shadow on the wall of the tent behind her.
We do eventually finish, coming together in a circle and going through some more gentle prayer and holding hands with the left facing up and the right facing down. The gentleman to my left still has a cold hand—the gentleman to my right, a warm hand. Then we went outside to the kitchen area to have some weak broth before going to bed around 3 AM.
Every round of ayahuasca is different; as such, none of this experience was duplicated on the second night of the ceremony. Instead, I saw the end of everything. I saw a black pulsating pit of gelatinous muck that I begged to take me. It rejected me. It was still nice to watch Ellen dance though.
The Paradox of the Good Republic
I have been kicking this essay around in my mind for years, but with a rapid rise in people dying from easily preventable causes, it finally seems the time to put it down for others.
The Good Republic seeks to better the lives of its citizens through an administrative state that creates health, safety, and financial regulations. In short, you get treated water, seatbelt laws, and regulations that prevent banks from gambling away your money.
Everyone benefits from the Good Republic, but uneducated people benefit disproportionately. Educated people don’t need to be told to drink clean water or wear seatbelts and would likely do it anyway. The uneducated on the other hand usually require a level of coercion to behave a certain way. The Good Republic requires seatbelts to be in every car AND levies hefty fines on those who refuse to use them. (Uneducated people say things like, “I don’t wear seatbelts because I might get trapped in a car fire,” not understanding the fact that if an impact is severe enough to cause a car fire, you won’t survive without a seatbelt in the first place. (Excepting of course the occasional Pinto that quickly gets outlawed by the Good Republic.)
The uneducated also benefit disproportionately, because statistically they will have more children. (The birth rate for those with high school attainment is 16 percent higher than those with a bachelor’s degree.[1]) So, the seatbelt law that prevents mommy and daddy from going through the windshield on the way to the delivery room also protects baby, and there will be more babies born to the uneducated than the educated.
The Good Republic protects EVERYONE from cholera, predatory lenders, and a host of other dangers. The Good Republic doesn’t discriminate based on educational attainment, because it knows as soon as you start picking who lives and who dies, you are no longer a Good Republic.
So… Children that would have been killed by cholera, jettisoned through windshields, and frozen after the bank forecloses on them in February, survive to adulthood, blissfully ignorant of the administrative state that allowed their survival. Bit by bit, the uneducated grow in electoral power. Generations pass, and society reaches a tipping point. Uneducated people, easily persuaded by corporate charlatans who don’t want to pay for seatbelts, water treatment, and free vaccinations start convincing the mass of uneducated that their life would be better without the intrusion of the Good Republic. They get hoodwinked into lower taxes and less regulation, so they begin to attack the “unelected bureaucrats” of the administrative state who work hard to keep them in the house they bought and to keep typhoid out of their drinking water. A population too young to remember what it was like to die from measles, votes to get rid of measles vaccines.
I am seeing this in headlines all over the country, but I am going to point it out in two specific locations, a measles cluster in Texas, and a fetus killed by raw milk in Florida.
Prior to the measles vaccine, the US averaged about 500,000 cases annually with 500 deaths.[2] While 500 isn’t a particularly large number, the long-term side effects of surviving measles means ranges from hearing loss[3] to greater susceptibility to things like bacterial meningitis.[4] Suffice it to say, even if you survived measles, it was life changing and a cause of premature death from other diseases.
After a vaccine was discovered in 1963, vaccine campaigns increasingly became the norm and by 1980, the vaccine was mandatory for school children in all of the US (with some very narrow exceptions.) Cases fell from 500,000 annually to an all time low of 24 resident cases in 2004.[5] Then exemptions started increasing year over year.[6] The correlative result of this was the 2014 Disneyland measles outbreak which was tied to the largest number of cases in 20 years. A total of 667 people would contract measles in 2014 (up from the all time low of 24 just ten years earlier.)[7] The next several years were a tug and pull between public information campaigns and anti-vaccination movements. Cases in 2019, were nearly double those in the year of the Disneyland outbreak, but staying inside during COVID-19 dropped cases from 1,274 in 2019 to only 13 in 2020.[8] If current events in Texas are any evidence, the Good Republic is dying alongside unvaccinated children.
Measles numbers in 2025 have already exceeded those in 2019 with a total of 1,431 at the time of this writing.[9] More than half of those come from Texas in unvaccinated communities.[10] There have been three deaths associated with the outbreak, two in Lubbock, Texas, and a third just over the border in Lea County, New Mexico.[11] What staggers the imagination is that as all of this was happening, the Texas House was passing a bill that makes it even easier to opt out to the measles vaccination for parents who merely need to sign a form that states they understand the risks. (Governor Abbot signed the bill into law in June.)[12] Let me make it clear. The worst measles outbreak in 30 years and Texas is making it easier to not get vaccinated.
Meanwhile in Florida, unpasteurized “raw milk” is making a comeback and resulting in at least one death (sort of). Milk straight out of the cow is healthy, but when it enters long-distance supply chains, there is a potential for a number of deadly diseases, most notably Salmonella and Listeria. Pasteurization involves heating the milk to a certain temperature to kill bacteria and then bottling it in a manner that prevents new bacteria from entering. In recent years, raw milk has been touted as a cure all for everything from allergies to boosting the immune system.[13] The Food and Drug Administration has spoken to this issue repeatedly to note that all of these purported benefits are non-existent or no different than pasteurized milk.[14] Yet consumption of raw milk that is labeled as animal food keeps getting more popular.[15] In Florida, 21 people were sickened by raw milk in August of 2025. The response from the Florida government was schizophrenic, with the Florida Department of Health website pointing out the dangers and the Florida Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, defending “informed health choices” of raw milk enthusiasts only a few days later.[16] One woman has sued the farm that sold the raw milk labeled as animal food because as E. coli and Campylobacter, raged through her household, she got sick and miscarried. She claimed she was unaware of the risks of drinking the raw milk labeled as animal food. With a Surgeon General like Joseph Ladapo, it isn’t surprising.
If it was just stupid people dying, I might not write this. The problem is that measles doesn’t check your voter registration before it kills you. Neither does E. coli on a door handle of a public building touched by a raw milk enthusiast who also doesn’t believe in washing hands.[17]
As deaths from preventable illness rise, it only bolsters the claim that the Good Republic is ineffective. More taxes are cut and the Good Republic can no longer sustain even the most basic functions of government. Everyone is harmed, but the uneducated most of all. The pendulum will eventually swing back, but the lesson seems to be a needless one. We have books that tell us about measles and foodborne illnesses. We shouldn’t need to live it to avoid it.
[1] Birth rate in the United States in 2023, by educational attainment of mother, Statista, 2025https://www.statista.com/statistics/241519/birth-rate-by-educational-attainment-of-mother-in-the-united-states/ Women with only high school degrees will have 58 children per 1,000 women compared to 50 for those with a bachelor’s degree. These numbers get skewed on the lower extremes of educational attainment, but the percentages of those with no high school diploma or a doctorate are so low as to not be relevant here.)
[2] Hinman AR, Orenstein WA, Bloch AB, Bart KJ, Eddins DL, Amler RW, Kirby CD. Impact of measles in the United States. Rev Infect Dis. 1983 May-Jun;5(3):439-44. doi: 10.1093/clinids/5.3.439. PMID: 6878996.
[3] Cohen BE, Durstenfeld A, Roehm PC. Viral causes of hearing loss: a review for hearing health professionals. Trends Hear. 2014 Jul 29;18:2331216514541361. doi: 10.1177/2331216514541361. PMID: 25080364; PMCID: PMC4222184.
[4] Griffin DE. Measles virus persistence and its consequences. Curr Opin Virol. 2020 Apr;41:46-51. doi: 10.1016/j.coviro.2020.03.003. Epub 2020 May 5. PMID: 32387998; PMCID: PMC7492426.
[5] Clemmons NS, Wallace GS, Patel M, Gastañaduy PA. Incidence of Measles in the United States, 2001-2015. JAMA. 2017 Oct 3;318(13):1279-1281. doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.9984. PMID: 28973240; PMCID: PMC5727570. Resident defined as someone who was in the United States at the time of transmission, not someone who arrived from another country already infected.
[6] Omer SB, Richards JL, Ward M, Bednarczyk RA. Vaccination policies and rates of exemption from immunization, 2005-2011. N Engl J Med. 2012 Sep 20;367(12):1170-1. doi: 10.1056/NEJMc1209037. PMID: 22992099; PMCID: PMC9993615.
[7] Clemmons NS, Wallace GS, Patel M, Gastañaduy PA. Incidence of Measles in the United States, 2001-2015. JAMA. 2017 Oct 3;318(13):1279-1281. doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.9984. PMID: 28973240; PMCID: PMC5727570.
[8] Number of new cases of measles (rubeola) in the U.S. from 1985 to 2025, Statista, 2025https://www.statista.com/statistics/186678/new-cases-of-measles-in-the-us-since-1950/
[9] Id.
[10] Amid measles outbreak, Texas lawmakers vote to make school vaccine exemptions easier, Jim Vertuno, PBS, May 27, 2025 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/amid-measles-outbreak-texas-lawmakers-vote-to-make-school-vaccine-exemptions-easier
[11] I concede some speculation on my part. Lea County, is 110 miles from Lubbock and the death in Lea County occurred 10 days after the first death in Lubbock. This could be coincidence and due to privacy laws, it is impossible to prove one way or another.
[12] Republican Party of Texas Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1144473394390820
[13] Raw Milk Misconceptions and the Danger of Raw Milk Consumption, FDA, https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/raw-milk-misconceptions-and-danger-raw-milk-consumption
[14] Id.
[15] Raw milk sales spike despite CDC’s warnings of risk associated with bird flu, JoNel Aleccia, PBS, May 14, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/raw-milk-sales-spike-despite-cdcs-warnings-of-risk-associated-with-bird-flu
[16] Florida Department of Health Provides Update on Raw Milk, Florida Department of Health, August 4, 2025 https://www.floridahealth.gov/newsroom/2025/08/20250806-florida-department-health-provides-update-raw-milk.pr.html. Florida surgeon general supports raw milk consumption despite 21 infections, Christopher O’Donnell, Tampa Bay Times, August 12, 2025 https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2025/08/12/florida-surgeon-general-supports-raw-milk-consumption-despite-21-infections/. (It is with wry humor to note that Ladabo also told parents of unvaccinated children that it was their decision on whether to keep their children home during a recent measles outbreak in Ft. Lauderdale.
[17] Approximately 38 percent of Americans are not aware that washing hands prevents disease. New National Survey Finds Nearly Half of US Adults Admit to Not Washing Their Hands at Key Moments National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, https://www.nfid.org/new-national-survey-finds-nearly-half-of-us-adults-admit-to-not-washing-their-hands-at-key-moments/