Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“The Turmoil Inside MAHA Is About More Than Just Vaccines”
The Wall Street Journal reports on tensions within the MAHA movement: “During the 2024 presidential campaign, then candidate Donald Trump and Kennedy harnessed the MAHA movement to powerful effect. Now, the coalition’s disparate factions are sparring over some of Kennedy’s biggest priorities—from vaccines to pharmaceutical regulation to pesticide use. And Kennedy’s effort to maintain the peace, according to several of his supporters, is turning out to be as difficult as herding cats.”
“Kennedy has worked for years alongside many people in his movement. They include ‘medical freedom’ activists who decry vaccine mandates and often question the science behind immunizations, especially Covid-19 shots. Others were drawn to Kennedy’s healthy food message, hoping he would move quickly to ban artificial dyes in food and to alter American diets. Still others supported his criticism of pesticides, microplastics and corporate power. Now that he is part of the Trump administration, his supporters want results—and are saying so online. They have criticized him for not moving quickly to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising and for not banning all injections that use messenger RNA technology. Some don’t like his declaration that his movement also aims to ‘make biotech great again.’”
The article continues: “Some activists who supported Kennedy’s presidential campaign and then persuaded skeptics of Trump to back the Republican ticket after Kennedy dropped out, are now beginning to waver over the administration’s handling of pesticides and so-called forever chemicals. Kennedy had pledged to tackle pesticides used by farmers, especially the herbicide glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup. As an environmental lawyer in 2018, he had helped win a landmark judgment against Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, for a client who said Roundup caused his cancer. Earlier this year, White House officials told Kennedy to stop talking about glyphosate, people familiar with the matter said. Since then, he has been mostly silent on the issue even as House Republicans proposed a provision that his allies say would essentially shield the pesticide’s maker from lawsuits. The Supreme Court has asked the administration’s solicitor general to weigh in on Bayer’s bid to help resolve the glyphosate litigation that has already cost it billions of dollars.”
“Federal Court Reopens Case of 24-Year-Old Who Died of COVID Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis”
At
, Brenda Baletti writes: “In a major win for medical freedom, a federal court today reopened a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) filed by the family of a 24-year-old college student who died from complications of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis.”George Watts Jr. “was a student at SUNY Corning Community College in Corning, New York, in the summer of 2021, when the school mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for all students attending fall classes. According to court documents, Watts suffered ‘medical symptoms’ after his first dose and more serious neurological side effects, along with a sinus infection, after the second dose. He was treated with antibiotics, but his health continued to decline. The 24-year-old had no previous medical history that would explain his death in the emergency room from cardiac arrest on Oct. 27, 2021. The medical examiner ruled the death was from ‘complications of COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.’”
Baletti reports that “After their son died, his family sued the DOD and Lloyd Austin III in his official capacity as defense secretary. The DOD oversaw the development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines under Operation Warp Speed. According to the lawsuit, the DOD ‘capitalized on a quintessential ‘bait and switch’ fraud,’ using the fact that Comirnaty was FDA-approved to bolster its claims that the Pfizer-BioNTech EUA vaccine was ‘safe and effective,’ misleading the American public in the process. COVID-19 vaccines are classified as a ‘covered countermeasure’ under the PREP Act. The act prevents anyone injured by a vaccine that was authorized during a public health emergency from suing the vaccine manufacturers or those who administer the vaccines. However, there’s one exception—if the person who was injured can prove that the vaccine maker or the person who administered the vaccine engaged in ‘willful misconduct.’ Watts’ family alleges that the DOD engaged in ‘willful misconduct’ by continuing to distribute only the stockpiled version of the EUA Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine—even after the FDA had granted full approval to another Pfizer vaccine, Comirnaty.”
“Beverly Hills School District Votes to Display Israeli Flag”
NBC Los Angeles reports that “Schools in the Beverly Hills Unified School District will display the flag of Israel for one month every year to signal support for the Jewish community after a Board of Education vote Tuesday night…The proposal proclaims May as Jewish Heritage Month and calls for display of the Israeli flag at each BHUSD school and facility throughout the month of May every year. It's part of a resolution to combat antisemitism that mixes Holocaust education, lessons on Jewish history and remembrance of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.”
The article quotes Beverly Hills Vice Mayor, John Mirisch, who stated that “This should be a no-brainer for a school district that represents one of the only Jewish-majority communities outside of Israel.” Shortly after the vote, the plan was overruled by the school district superintendent and subsequently scrapped. However, the fact that it was even under discussion and initially passed lends credence to Pankaj Mishra’s observation, featured in Weekly Grounding #108, that “The destruction of U.S. institutions in order to suppress criticism of Israeli war crimes speaks to a pathology of self-mutilation that is striking even when measured against Stalin’s and Mao’s regimes (which, though infinitely more brutal, cared, above all, about projecting an image of national autonomy and sovereignty).”
“The Americans Moving to Wartime Russia for ‘Traditional Values’”
The Financial Times reports on Americans who have left the United States in order to begin new lives in Russia: “Last year, Moscow created a new ‘shared values’ visa offering expedited residency permits to disaffected western nationals—echoing the Soviet era when state propaganda also posited Russia as the global antithesis to a corrupt, capitalist west. Up to 150 people a month currently apply for this visa, Russian officials say.” These foreigners are “among a small but vocal trickle of westerners drawn by Russia’s self-portrayal as a bastion of conservative values—in contrast to a dangerous and decadent west—who rack up tens of thousands of views telling their story online.”
“The largest share of applicants comes from Germany, followed by France and the US…” One German, Jakob Pinneker, “said Russia’s ‘traditional values’ were a natural draw for people, and a reason he chose to stay—as well as feeling freer in Russia to air his views…One of the families he has worked with are Canadian couple Arend and Anneesa Feenstra who moved to Russia with eight of their nine children last year to start a farm in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The Feenstras’s YouTube channel now has almost 200,000 subscribers.”
“Schools Make Kids Crazy”
At The Brownstone Institute, James Bovard reports: “Almost one-third of government schools nationwide are now surveilling the mental health of students. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a bill to bring ‘universal mental health screening’ to two million Illinois students as part of his Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. But this rescue effort will ravage many students and is a warning shot to parents across the nation.”
Bovard writes that “Schools are…subverting mental health by vastly exaggerating…perils that students face via bizarre school shooting drills. In Indiana, elementary school teachers were shot as part of a ‘safe schools’ training program. According to the Indiana State Teachers Association, sheriffs’ deputies ordered teachers ‘into a room four at a time, told them to crouch down and then shot them execution-style with pellets in rapid succession,”’ leaving several of them bloodied and many of them screaming. The union complained, ‘The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened. Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.’ Schools are ‘increasingly turning their hallways into an imitation of a real mass shooting, complete with police officers firing BB guns and drama students enlisted to play victims, made up with fake blood and bullet holes. Occasionally, the drills are sprung on teachers and students without warning,’ as a student newspaper in Great Neck, New York, observed. A Pennsylvania teacher commented that she was ‘more traumatized than trained’ after teachers were shot with airsoft guns by a fake active shooter. ‘We had colleagues shooting colleagues, we had people getting hit with [plastic] pellets.…People were screaming, trying to run. People were tripping over each other. It was just horrendous,’ Elizabeth Yanelli recalled.”
“Plenty of students are bummed because they recognize they have practically no escape from surveillance,” the article continues. “Schools boast of giving kids free laptops, but that becomes the equivalent of wearing an electronic ankle monitor to track everything a person writes or every step they take online. A recent study found that the vast majority of companies that schools hire to surveil students online actually track kids 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, using school-issued devices. The study found that 29% of the companies ‘generate student “risk scores” based on online behavior…’ The Center for Democracy and Technology reported in 2023: ‘Student activity monitoring continues to harm many of the students it claims to help: Disciplinary actions, outing of students, and initiation of law enforcement contact are still regular outcomes’ of surveillance of students’ computer use.”
"Bring Back Aristocratic Tutoring"
At
, writes on aristocratic tutoring: “[I]f we go back in time, tutoring often did act as the main method of education—at least for the elite. This was aristocratic tutoring, and it was quite different from a tutor you meet in a coffee shop to go over SAT math problems while the clock ticks down. It was also different from ‘tiger parenting,’ which is specifically focused around the résumé padding that’s needed for college admissions. Historically, aristocratic tutoring usually involved a paid adult tutor who was an expert in the field. The tutor would spend significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions (often in a live-in capacity), and fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields. As the name suggests, it was something reserved mostly for aristocrats, which means—no way around it—it was deeply inequitable.”Hoel goes on to discuss ways in which the tutoring model might be used outside the aristocratic context in today’s world: “[W]hat was so great about tutoring my own son to read was how he now has more free time, not less. A big learning milestone is out of the way after just 100–200 hours of actual butt-in-chair time—and not only that, he now has the freedom to learn by himself. People, including myself, are beginning to realize that the real reason to deploy the best and most effective methods of education is to chip away at the totalizing time suck our inefficient school system has become. Give kids more time to be kids, not less, and they can go outside and do that most aristocratic of all activities: play.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.