MAHA: Making America Have Awful Diarrhea

Trump's favorite misogynist influencers had a bad week, and the DOJ is going after journalists' families

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I was going to report on the cyclospora outbreak today, but then a second cyclospora outbreak was discovered. And a salmonella outbreak. And more measles outbreaks. You can see where this is going.

Making America Hospitalized Again

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. promised to Make America Healthy Again. At this rate, we would settle for Make America Stop Pooping Again.

The country is currently battling two separate cyclospora outbreaks, a salmonella outbreak, and the worst measles outbreak in 35 years. There have been over 11,000 cases of cyclospora reported in 2026, up from 2,700 in all of 2025, with Michigan alone accounting for more than 7,000 cases.

The CDC traced one cyclospora outbreak to iceberg lettuce, which prompted a recall from Taylor Farms. Kennedy declared the outbreak “under control” shortly after a second, entirely separate cluster with no identified source was discovered.

Next, a sprawling outbreak of salmonella was discovered. It has sickened at least 513 people across 43 states, hospitalized over 130, and killed one person in Washington state. A quarter of the infected are children under five.

Then measles cases began picking up. The CDC confirmed 2,318 cases this week, surpassing all of 2025 and hitting a 35-year high. There have been 35 new outbreaks across 45 jurisdictions, the vast majority of cases in unvaccinated people.

Kennedy’s response has been a masterclass in contradiction: encouraging the MMR vaccine in press conferences while his handpicked CDC deputy shrugged off losing America’s elimination status as the “cost of doing business.”

Meanwhile, the infrastructure designed to catch these crises early has been gleefully dismantled on Kennedy’s watch. The CDC’s FoodNet surveillance program was slashed from tracking eight pathogens to just two. Cyclospora was among the ones dropped. The FDA lost 3,500 staff, including food safety inspectors. The Trump administration also terminated $5.78 billion in CDC grants to states.

This is what it looks like when the person in charge of protecting public health spent decades undermining it. Kennedy promised to overhaul the food system, and to his credit, he did get millions of Americans to stop eating lettuce.

MAGA’s Favorite Misogynists Are Having a Bad Week

The guys who teach young men to treat women like property are themselves now government property.

Andrew and Tristan Tate, the self-described misogynists who built an online empire teaching angry young men to treat women like property, were arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami on 59 combined charges in the U.K., including rape, sex trafficking, assault, and possession of indecent images of a child. Andrew alone is facing 42 charges.

The Tate brothers are loud, proud MAGA supporters, and the feeling appears to be mutual. In early 2025, Trump administration officials reportedly pressured Romania to lift the travel restrictions keeping the brothers in the country while they awaited trial on human trafficking and rape charges.

Romania complied, and the Tates promptly hopped on a private jet to Florida. Within weeks of landing in the U.S., Andrew Tate allegedly assaulted his girlfriend in Los Angeles.

Barron Trump reportedly built a relationship with Andrew to help the campaign reach young male voters, while Don Jr. called his detention in Romania “absolute insanity” and appeared on a livestream with him. After the 2024 election, the brothers were celebrated as heroes who helped deliver the manosphere vote.

These aren’t random creeps — they’re the most influential misogynists in the world. They’ve built a global empire teaching millions of teenage boys that women shouldn’t drive, shouldn’t leave the house, and should be treated as property. Andrew Tate’s content was banned from every major social media platform for hate speech.

The Tates spent years teaching boys that power means never facing consequences. The Trump administration spent a year proving them right. And if it were up to this administration, the Tates would still be poolside in Miami.

The Government Went After Reporters’ Families

If you wanted to silence the press, you wouldn’t start by banning newspapers. You’d start by making reporters too afraid to pick up the phone.

On July 8th and 9th, the New York Times published two stories about security concerns with Trump’s new Air Force One, the jet gifted to him by Qatar. The Secret Service had been so alarmed by the plane’s vulnerabilities that it urged Trump not to fly home from Turkey on it.

Two days later, the Justice Department issued subpoenas demanding five Times reporters testify before a grand jury. Without telling the Times, the DOJ also subpoenaed phone service providers for the reporters’ call and text records, and the records of two reporters’ spouses and one reporter’s mother.

The subpoenas reached back to the start of 2026, months before the Air Force One story even ran. The government wasn’t investigating a specific leak — it was fishing through reporters’ entire source networks.

FBI Director Kash Patel personally oversaw the operation from the White House. The Freedom of the Press Foundation put it simply: “Even the Mafia says families are off limits.”

The Times argued in court on Thursday that the DOJ had violated its own media guidelines, which require any subpoenas of journalists to be a last resort. Judge Arun Subramanian challenged nearly every aspect of the federal government’s case, flagging what he called sloppy legal work, and threatened sanctions. The DOJ dropped the subpoenas by the end of the hearing.

This is a win, but it only happened because the New York Times has the lawyers and the money to fight back. Most newsrooms don’t, which is the whole point of going after reporters this way. It’s not about winning in court, but about making the next journalist think twice before publishing.

This is why independent media exists, and why we started AlterNet America. We don’t have a parent company with advertisers to protect or a billionaire owner who can quietly kill a story. Right now, the the only business model in journalism that can’t be bullied into silence is reader-funded.

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—Ryan Rose, Co-Founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America