Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday’s “State of the Union” over vaccines, COVID-19, autism research and the nation’s growing measles outbreak, with the veteran anchor challenging the health secretary’s claims by citing decades of scientific research and public health data.

The contentious interview came as the United States experiences its second consecutive record-breaking year for measles cases, with Bash noting on-air that infections have reached a 35-year high and that roughly 93% of cases have occurred among unvaccinated people.

Asked whether he accepted any responsibility for the resurgence after years as one of the country’s most prominent vaccine skeptics, Kennedy responded, “Absolutely not,” arguing the outbreak is part of a broader international trend and pointing to higher per-capita case rates in several other countries.

Kennedy instead blamed the COVID-19 lockdown period for reduced childhood vaccination rates, arguing that missed immunizations during the pandemic created today’s vulnerable populations. He also maintained that his department has responded quickly to outbreaks by deploying federal public health teams to affected states.

Throughout the interview, Bash repeatedly interrupted Kennedy to challenge claims she said conflicted with the broader scientific consensus, particularly on COVID-19 vaccines and autism research. At one point, she told Kennedy that “study after study after study” has found no link between vaccines and autism, citing findings from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Kennedy rejected those conclusions, arguing existing research has not adequately examined vaccines administered during the first six months of life and accusing Bash of relying too heavily on experts rather than the underlying research.

The exchange grew increasingly tense after Kennedy accused CNN of contributing to misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and suggested Bash was repeating claims without independently examining the evidence. Bash pushed back, defending her role as a journalist.

“My job is to find out and tell the truth,” she said.

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The interview also touched on a Wall Street Journal report that President Donald Trump has encouraged Kennedy to pursue additional research examining possible links between vaccines and autism. Kennedy confirmed Trump supports further study while also saying his department is investigating a broader range of potential environmental factors that may contribute to autism.

The nearly 20-minute interview ended with Bash defending the role of scientific expertise in public health reporting while Kennedy maintained that federal health agencies should continue reexamining longstanding assumptions about vaccine safety and other medical issues.

A statement was released by a CNN spokeperson to Salon regarding this interview.

Dana Bash is a veteran journalist who conducted a newsmaking interview with Secretary Kennedy in which he stated that he supports parents getting their children vaccinated against measles and addressed President Trump’s push for further study into autism and vaccines. Asking tough, substantive questions to those in power is the job of every journalist, and Dana did hers incredibly well today. We stand behind Dana, her reporting, and CNN’s overall coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

UPDATED: Aug. 2, 2026 at 2:12 p.m. to include statement from CNN.

The post “My job is to find out the truth”: Dana Bash grills RFK Jr. over vaccines appeared first on Salon.com.

Allow me to sing, o Muse, of a recent dinner conversation about “The Odyssey.” The setting was not a Greek restaurant but a Vietnamese joint. My friend Sharon and I had just settled at our table and ordered our dinner and drinks when she steered our conversation toward Christopher Nolan’s latest opus.

Have I seen it? she asked. Of course. What did I think? It was fine, I said. A little too long, definitely overhyped. I think I described it as Nolan’s baroque reward for “Oppenheimer.”

Then, like Odysseus himself, she aimed at her main target of derision: Matt Damon. What on Earth possessed Nolan, a notoriously detail-oriented director, to tap the all-purpose flour of movie stars to portray one of the most storied heroes in literature?

“What, was Leo not available?” she asked, as if petitioning the gods. But divine entities stopped intervening in man’s affairs long ago; besides, I had the answer drawn and nocked since I’d walked out of the theater days before.

Why not Leo? Because nobody would believe Leonardo DiCaprio could string that bow.

I can only imagine that at this point, restaurant waitstaffs across the world have picked up crumbs and slices of chatter about Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old blockbuster. Nolan’s work is designed to bring out everyone’s inner critic and professor, but his execution of “The Odyssey” tosses us plenty of bones to pick.

By now the distinctiveness of Nolan’s cinematic ruminations is common knowledge. Whether we’re talking about “Oppenheimer,” “Interstellar” or his “Batman” trilogy, Nolan is a seasoned explorer in the realm of man’s hubris and its relationship with personal history, time and memory, especially the selective variety, among many touchstones. The nonlinear nature of Homer’s epic poem lends itself to his style.

But perhaps the least appreciated aspect of Nolan’s approach is his conscious use of modern celebrities in his version of one of the earliest stories to question the human compulsion to reach for fabled immortality at the cost of the people beside us. In essence, Nolan chose a superstar cast to drive home the interpretation of Homer’s saga as a legend about fame.

Spinning that lore for a modern audience, then, calls for fronting the cast with a star whose popular persona is outsized compared to his dramatic proficiency. Damon is the simplest and most reliable vehicle to tell us about a complicated man, as the highly lauded translator Emily Wilson describes Odysseus.

By this, I don’t mean to call Damon a bad actor. I’m just saying that his “Odyssey” performance is workmanlike. Wilson, for her part, walked away from the film with an impression of Nolan’s efforts that makes a person picture the Muse Calliope whispering in her ear, “Drag him.”  Thus inspired, she wrote a long and brutal essay for the London Review of Books.

In my view, though, if the idea is to position Odysseus as an everyman hero swept up in a maelstrom of ordeals too vast for him to conquer, Damon was always going to be Nolan’s guy.

Which brings us back to the hero’s mythical recurve. Odysseus’ bow is an extension of his valorous identity. It is his Excalibur, his Andúril, the vaunted weapon only he can string and use to hit a bullseye through a row of twelve crossed axes. The fact that none of Penelope’s suitors could do that marked them as unfit to take his place as Ithaca’s king.

And while my friend made very good points about Hollywood personal trainers and physics and how, through creatine, all things are possible, the simple fact is that we’re more likely to buy that the man synonymous with Jason Bourne would be the only one who can bend that buster, string it, and make it sing.

It might seem strange to look this deeply into the why of Matt Damon as Odysseus, since his casting didn’t agitate right-wing trolls. The MAGA crowd whined early and loudly when the trades announced Lupita Nyong’o’s selection to play Helen of Troy, a fuss only slightly outdone by the news of Elliot Page’s casting as a Greek soldier named Sinon. When the rumor mills incorrectly assumed Page was playing Achilles, heads exploded.

But Nyong’o’s Helen, admirably performed though it was, contained few of the metatextual implications of Nolan’s other casting choices.

Tapping Travis Scott to play the Bard singing the tales of Odysseus’ exploits, for example, doesn’t merely reframe the role of ancient storytellers and poets as that age’s rappers. Scott is a 10-time Grammy nominee whose ability to combine spectacle with his lyrical craft has gained him a significantly passionate following. He is a brand unto himself and a sought-after corporate ambassador. If a queen like Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) desired to send a message to her unworthy suitors about their inadequacy, she’d choose a rhapsodist with that kind of pull who also blends in with a boisterous crowd.

Then we have Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, whom Odysseus follows to Troy and, ultimately, his cursed fate. Placing famous directors in front of the camera is a classic auteur filmmaker flourish, and Safdie is both an actor and a director mainly associated with indie films.

Notably, unlike Damon’s Odysseus, Safdie’s Agamemnon is not jacked. But his intimidating onyx armor obscures all that, much in the way Darth Vader’s helmet and cloak overcompensate for his shriveled form. We don’t see Agamemnon’s face for most of the movie until the end, when his wife and Helen’s twin Clytemnestra (also Nyong’o) murders him in the bathtub as revenge for sacrificing their daughter. Only then do we see this dark colossus for the slight creature he always was.

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Admittedly, that’s a lot more flexible interpretation than the obvious reasoning behind Damon’s selection. Yes, Nolan has worked with some of the most distinguished actors of our time, including Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy and Leo.

But when reading the famous opener of one longstanding translation — “Speak, memory, of the cunning hero/The wanderer, blown off course time and again” —  few broadly popular A-list actors besides Damon live up to that picture.

Damon’s Odysseus captures all the heroic arrogance, bravery and selfish stupidity of an action-flick brawler who would shoot a giant cyclops in the eye as he’s making his escape, just because. Moves like that make it easy to comprehend that his ill-fated meanders could have been avoided if he’d followed the same directions that got everyone else home sooner.

But really, it all comes back to that bow. Only a true and blustery hero can string it, much as we believe that only Damon can win a knife fight by wielding a pen. And if we’re being honest, DiCaprio may have earned an Oscar for his performance in “The Revenant,” but he does not have the biceps to take on that CGI grizzly.

The post Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus could only be Matt Damon appeared first on Salon.com.

The American Civil Liberties Union and its state affiliates have filed 54 administrative claims against the federal government on behalf of people who allege they were harmed by federal immigration enforcement, launching what the organization says is one of its broadest coordinated legal efforts challenging ICE operations.

The claims, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, span 17 states and Washington, D.C., and represent the first legal step required before individuals can sue the federal government. The ACLU said the filings allege a pattern of misconduct by federal immigration agents, including excessive force, unlawful arrests, racial profiling, retaliation against people exercising their First Amendment rights and abuse while in detention.

Among the claims is one filed on behalf of Dr. Norma Bowe, a New Jersey nurse and Kean University professor who alleges she was assaulted by federal agents while providing medical care outside Delaney Hall, an immigration detention facility in Newark. Other claims involve U.S. citizens and legal residents who say they were wrongfully detained or subjected to aggressive enforcement actions despite having legal status.

“These are not isolated incidents,” the ACLU said in a press release announcing the coordinated filings, arguing the claims reflect a broader pattern of unlawful conduct by federal immigration authorities.

The Department of Homeland Security rejected the allegations, defending its immigration enforcement efforts and criticizing the ACLU’s characterization of federal operations. The agency said its officers are trained to enforce immigration laws while protecting public safety and complying with federal law.

The administrative claims do not themselves constitute lawsuits. Under federal law, agencies generally have an opportunity to review and respond before claimants can pursue litigation in court. If the claims are denied or remain unresolved after the statutory review period, the individuals may seek damages through federal lawsuits.

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The coordinated filings come as immigration enforcement remains a central issue in the Trump administration’s agenda and as civil rights organizations continue mounting legal challenges to enforcement tactics across the country.

The post ACLU launches nationwide legal challenge over alleged ICE abuses appeared first on Salon.com.

By most objective standards, the 2026 FIFA World Cup tournament — which concluded two weeks ago in New Jersey with Spain’s grueling 1-0 victory over Argentina — was a major success. Despite global anxiety over the collision between the world’s largest sporting event and Donald Trump’s “America First” regime, stadiums were mostly full across North America, fans and players from all sorts of large and small countries seemed to enjoy themselves (and tried to smuggle home large quantities of ranch dressing) and, of course, something like $15 billion flowed into FIFA’s coffers. 

Just below the surface, however, the soccer world was seething with discontent. That erupted into all-out rebellion this week, which could finally bring down Gianni Infantino, the Swiss administrator who has served as FIFA chief executive for the last decade. Unpacking the byzantine history of alleged or actual corruption within FIFA and the numerous regional and national federations under its purview would be a dissertation-length project. But it’s definitely not wrong to say there’s a Trump angle, and that Infantino’s marriage of convenience and shared sensibility with the U.S. president may bring his downfall. 

Even before this year’s tournament, Infantino stood accused of commercializing or “Americanizing” world soccer — a process he did not start but has certainly accelerated — and of shamelessly cozying up to Trump, whom he presented with the newly-invented FIFA Peace Prize, aka the “Temu Nobel,” last December. That was all inarguably true, and the guy has form, as they say on British cop shows. Back in 2022, while seeking to justify holding the World Cup in Qatar, an autocratic monarchy with a famously dreadful human rights record, Infantino launched a thousand memes with this memorable monologue:

“Today I have very strong feelings, I can tell you. Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”

If it seems extraordinary that a major executive of any enterprise, anywhere in the world, could say stuff like that and still have a job four years later, you are beginning to appreciate the hallucinatory Infantino experience. Anyway, in 2026 Infantino seems to have swapped all those intersectional identities for an adjunct MAGA membership, and this year’s World Cup pushed the soccer world’s bizarre love-hate relationship with its leader into overdrive. 

Tom Burrows of the Athletic did a nice job this week of summarizing the indictment: Infantino drove World Cup ticket prices to previously unimagined levels, introduced “commercial breaks in each half [of matches] dressed up as hydration breaks” — a network-friendly innovation that global football had resisted for decades — capitulated to Trump in reversing a red-card suspension for U.S. star striker Folarin Balogun, and introduced a “surreal halftime show” featuring Madonna, BTS and Justin Bieber in the final match, in obvious (and inept) imitation of the Super Bowl. 

All of that, mind you, came before Infantino’s big surprise this past week: Apparently without consulting any relevant stakeholders, he announced a plan to spin off commercial rights to the World Cup into a new for-profit company (FIFA is a nonprofit, like other international sporting federations) and then sell off a big chunk of that company to an investment consortium led by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. So it’s not entirely accurate to say that Infantino wanted to sell world soccer’s biggest brand to the Trump family. But it’s not exactly false either. 

To coin a phrase, you can’t make this stuff up. But the good news, or the kind-of good news, or the “why in God’s name did this take so long” news, is that Infantino has finally choked on an overdose of hubris. His proposal collapsed within 48 hours and as of this weekend has been abandoned completely. (Soccer fans will discern unmistakable echoes of the European Super League, a proposed NFL-style closed competition for Europe’s top club teams that was announced in 2021 and imploded within a few weeks.)

UEFA, the federation that governs European soccer and is by far the most powerful of FIFA’s regional subsidiaries, wasted no time in rejecting Infantino’s scheme and announcing that none of its 55 national teams would participate in any FIFA competitions until the proposal was ditched. That was almost certainly enough to torpedo this galaxy-brain plan, and other regional confederations — most notably Concacaf, which represents North America, Central America and the Caribbean, and therefore includes the U.S. — soon followed UEFA’s lead, if not as aggressively. 

Donald Trump did not pick up the phone on this occasion. (“Johnny who? Really, I barely know the guy.”) Only the Confederation of African Football — whose member nations, fairly or otherwise, are perceived as Infantino supporters — remained silent. More on that shortly.

Anyone who follows world soccer already knows that UEFA has its own extensive history of political intrigue and internal scandal, and is not well positioned to play populist hero in this drama. But as is so often the case in world affairs, there are no good guys in the story and you have to pick your poison. One could draw a rough analogy with the European Union, a deeply flawed entity that nonetheless represents some degree of ideological or economic counterweight to Trump’s America. In this particular confrontation, Europe held nearly all the cards. 

While the next men’s World Cup, FIFA’s biggest golden goose, is still four years away, the consequences of a European boycott would have been felt immediately. The under-20 Women’s World Cup begins in Poland about a month from now, and qualifying playoffs for FIFA’s second-biggest event, the Women’s World Cup (to be held next summer in Brazil) are set for October. Given his avowed commitments to promoting the women’s game and youth soccer at all levels, Infantino simply couldn’t afford to play chicken with UEFA and risk losing those tournaments. Joshua Kushner and his family, one imagines, will not starve. 

This may be stretching the point, but there’s a thematic resemblance at work here to the worldwide pushback against Big Tech data centers, and against the opaque government processes that gets them built, as well as to the popular and legal resistance that has stalled the $110 billion merger between Warner Bros. and Paramount. It’s also true that Infantino is now understood, both to soccer fans and the world at large, as a proxy for Donald Trump, which looks like a much worse bet than it did a year ago. Infantino was cruising to likely re-election as FIFA president next year, but right now it’s an even-money bet that he can survive the next month. 

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Like his White House buddy, Infantino has thrived on a remarkable ability to weaponize greed and cynicism, both on an epic scale and at ground level. He fully intended to push through his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup by casting himself, believe it or not, as a defender of the downtrodden and underprivileged. He feels gay and African and disabled, remember? The uncomfortable truth is that he has ruled over a vast global sports and merchandising empire largely by fulfilling his promises to channel lots of money into regional and national federations in the Global South that have historically had few resources. 

Under Infantino’s proposed plan, each of FIFA’s 211 federations — at least the ones who supported him! — would have received an immediate cash infusion of $40 million, with further annual installments to follow. That sum would barely make a difference to the football gods in England, Spain or France, but would been enormous in Malawi or Madagascar. Affluent European nations don’t need infusions of private equity capital to build new stadiums and support younger players, and can afford to stand up to Infantino’s Trump-flavored bribery scheme. For players, parents, coaches and local officials in sub-Saharan Africa, the equation might have looked very different. Why should they care where the money comes from? This particular grift may have failed, but in a world built on massive structural inequality, grifters tend to prosper.

The post Trump’s FIFA pal in trouble as plan to sell off World Cup collapses appeared first on Salon.com.

Right-wing media looks to have made a profound miscalculation. They put Hunter Biden through an unrelenting public pressure cooker, convinced that by turning a private citizen’s darkest personal rock bottom into a daily political circus, they could break both the man and his family. Now, seven years into his sobriety, Biden has picked up a podcast mic and won’t stop talking. The man whom the right spent years trying to destroy is now walking into rooms they open up for him — and setting them on fire from the inside.

For the better part of the past decade, conservative media made a concerted effort to turn Biden into the ultimate avatar of political corruption: the degenerate failson as a symbol of Democratic rot. During his father Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the right devoted extensive attention to Hunter’s overseas business dealings, particularly his role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and allegations stemming from a laptop Hunter owned that surfaced in GOP hands shortly before the election. The laptop story became a defining example of modern media dynamics after the major social media companies temporarily limited distribution of an October 2020 New York Post article that included information taken from the laptop, a decision that conservatives still cite as evidence of a massive, multi-institution coverup. Republican lawmakers spent endless congressional hours investigating his digital footprint, but were ultimately unable to establish that the elder Biden had engaged in a criminal bribery scheme tied to his son’s business activities. 

The meandering story is what makes the current public rehabilitation of Hunter Biden one of the stranger spectacles in American politics. Right-wing media turned him into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage. 

Having emerged from severe addiction, public humiliation and federal prosecution, Biden is now truth-telling about his past and single-handedly roasting the right wing’s bad-faith outrage ecosystem on its own home turf. This year alone Biden has sat for hours-long interviews with independent outlets that cater to the very audience the GOP spent a decade cultivating against his family. He talked to Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, whose YouTube following runs past three million and skews toward people who trust almost nothing coming out of U.S. institutions. He talked to Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who spent years amplifying allegations against him. Ryan then hooked him up with MAGA podcaster Candace Owens, who once called him a degenerate who belonged in prison. 

Biden’s media strategy is dangerous and fascinating. He has described his media blitz as partly about addiction recovery and partly about strategy. Independent podcasts and YouTube channels have replaced the legacy media gatekeepers that used to referee these fights, and Biden figured out faster than most Democratic operatives that the audience he needed to reach was sitting in exactly the media ecosystem built to hate him. “No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he told one interviewer, arguing that years of investigations and public scrutiny had lowered expectations to the point where audiences were surprised simply to hear him speak coherently at length. His approach appears designed to replace years of secondhand portrayals with direct exposure. 

Biden’s rapid growth on X further underscores this tactical evolution. Joining Elon Musk’s platform just days before his interview with Owens dropped, Biden began tweeting with relentless energy, sometimes authoring over 100 posts a day. Commentators quickly dubbed him a “MAGA whisperer” as he systematically dismantled right-wing talking points and exposed media figures he accused of building careers off bad-faith attacks. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a scathing review of Jill Biden’s memoir — which defended the former president’s fitness for office — Hunter immediately went on the offensive, blasting Tapper and corporate media for what he viewed as complicity in weaponizing personal family dynamics for television ratings.

Biden’s new approach mixes vulnerability with nuclear-grade anger. Instead of avoiding controversy, he frequently addresses it head on. On a Barstool Sports podcast this week, he joked about signing a laptop and openly discussed his struggles with crack cocaine addiction. For a movement that has invested years in hyping “Hunter’s laptop” as a civilization-ending scandal, seeing the man himself turn it into a potential merchandising opportunity should be humiliating.

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On that same Barstool appearance, he delivered an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump’s entire family: “F**k him. F**k his sons. F**k his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family, down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time that I am on this earth, that their names live in ignominy.” Biden backed that rage up with a substantive critique, pointing out that the Trump sons received $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts in just 18 months and that son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite holding no government position, is reportedly receiving more than $110 million from the Saudis, tied to nuclear enrichment authorization and billions in investment funds. 

But Biden is also reaching out beyond the right-wing media ecosystem. He has appeared on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” podcasts hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Don Lemon, and the “I’ve Had It” podcast with hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan. Yet his aggressive, unapologetic posture does not spare Democrats. He has openly torched party leaders who pressured his father to abandon his 2024 reelection bid following the president’s disastrous debate performance, specifically calling out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “piece of s**t” for his role in pushing his father aside. “I’m not running for anything, so I can say whatever the f**k I want,” Hunter Biden declared, giving voice to millions of frustrated progressives who are sick and tired of watching Democratic leaders play by polite, outdated rules while right-wing extremists burn down democratic norms. 

It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.

To be certain, Biden’s media strategy has generated intense criticism, especially his decision to sit down with the extreme, far-right activist Nick Fuentes. The interview, filmed in a Philadelphia studio dressed up to resemble a seedy motel in a wink at the laptop scandal, quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of views. During the interview, which reportedly nearly escalated into a physical confrontation, the two found common ground, trading skepticism about American support for Israel, with Fuentes framing his objections as political rather than religious, a distinction that will comfort no one who has watched what he actually says about Jews. When discussing their public reputations, Biden joked, “I’m a crackhead,” to which Fuentes replied, “I’m a racist,” prompting Biden to shoot back, “Mine is true!”

Biden defended the pairing on social media in terms that sound almost reasonable — until you remember who he is talking about. He argued that people who profit from keeping Americans separated have built a business model on it, and that he would sit down with anyone who sees Trump as an enemy, regardless of what else they believe. He was explicit that Fuentes’ views on race and women are indefensible, and that what Fuentes has said about the Holocaust and Nazism cannot be defended. But he argued that one issue — stopping Trump — mattered more than any daylight between him and a man who leads an online movement built substantially on racial grievance. 

This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every troll counts on succeeding, because it leads and allows audiences to conclude that platforming extremist speech and views like Fuentes’ is a savvy tactical maneuver rather than what it actually is: a laundering operation. In this particular wash cycle, Fuentes needed laundering a great deal more than Biden needed an outlet. 

The instinct to give Fuentes and people like him a bigger microphone under the banner of anti-Trump unity deserves more skepticism. There is no common ground with someone whose political project is ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, and treating a two-hour conversation as evidence that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” echoes the bad faith politics that lets extremists claim they were misunderstood or “just joking” the whole time. It’s just whitewashing bigotry for clicks. 

But Hunter Biden’s choice to sit with Fuentes exposes something crucial about our current media environment. At a moment when fascism is organizing through podcasts and X feeds, he has stumbled into a role Democrats should have desperately filled: that of a loud, media-savvy fighter who doesn’t care about decorum. By owning his flaws and speaking directly to the public, Biden has stripped the right-wing outrage machine of its primary power source.

The post Right-wing media can’t quit Hunter Biden appeared first on Salon.com.

Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions from a Senate committee more than 100 times on July 29, 2026.

The Republican-led hearing – convened to scrutinize Fauci’s management of the pandemic and the origins of COVID-19 – was the latest chapter in a political story that began in 2020, when uncertainty, fear and frustration with the government became entangled with conspiracy theories.

In the past six years, some of these theories have emerged from the margins of the internet and made their way into Republican politics, the MAGA movement, anti-vaccine communities and even white-nationalist extremist networks.

Conspiracy theories do not simply explain events, they identify villains – and Fauci has become one of the most popular in this particular story.

In the years since the pandemic, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and others have accused Fauci of many things, but the central conspiracy accusation is that Fauci helped enable the COVID-19 pandemic through U.S.-funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, and then participated in a coordinated government-scientific cover-up, misleading Congress to conceal that connection and suppress the laboratory-leak explanation. Paul, a Republican, has repeatedly called for Fauci’s prosecution.

In January 2025, President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon covering potential federal offenses related to his government service since 2014. Fauci had not been charged with a crime, but critics portrayed the pardon as evidence that he had something to hide. Fauci has denied claims of wrongdoing and has testified multiple times before Congress.

The Fauci conspiracy is much bigger than Rand Paul, though. Paul may be its most persistent congressional promoter, but it’s been amplified by a wider network of Republican lawmakers. Several Republican members of Congress, such as Rep. Steve Scalise, Rep. James Comer and former Rep. Brad Wenstrup, among others, have advanced versions of the Fauci/COVID-origin narrative. House Republicans formally investigated these claims for two years, while members repeatedly accused Fauci of suppressing the lab-leak theory and misleading the public.

That investigation ultimately endorsed a central claim of the conspiracy narrative: the House GOP’s COVID-19 investigation concluded the virus most likely leaked from a Wuhan lab, that Fauci helped shape a scientific paper dismissing that theory, and that he privately testified the “six feet apart” guidance “sort of just appeared” – though these are the conclusions of a partisan committee, not an independent inquiry, and Fauci and Democratic members have disputed them.

I’m an associate professor of sociology and criminology, and my scholarship focuses on far-right networks and digital radicalization – the exact ecosystem where these conspiracy theories have taken root and spread. My research on how these movements evolve online and intersect with political activists and extremist networks was directly relevant to tracing how COVID-origin claims moved from fringe communities into mainstream political discourse.

Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment, which he and his lawyer explained not only as a basic constitutional right but also a strategy to avoid the possibility that Paul might try to prosecute him for lying to Congress based on anything he might say, may be politically explosive and provide his opponents with another talking point. But, in my assessment, the spectacle says more about what happens when conspiracy theories become embedded in political institutions than it does about the origins of COVID-19.

From uncertainty to conspiracy

COVID-19 created the conditions in which conspiracy theories flourish: enormous uncertainty, frightening consequences, rapidly changing information and distrust of institutions.

People wanted explanations. Why did the virus appear in Wuhan? Why did recommendations about masks change? How were vaccines developed so quickly?

These questions were legitimate. Problems emerged when those questions became connected to a predetermined conclusion: Powerful people either created the pandemic or concealed the connection to the lab in Wuhan.

A 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute illustrates how widespread one version of this thinking was. About 4 in 10 Americans – 39% – agreed that the coronavirus had been intentionally developed by scientists in a laboratory. Among QAnon believers – a sprawling conspiracy theory claiming that a cabal of powerful elites, often portrayed as child-trafficking Satanists, controls government and society and that Donald Trump was secretly fighting it – the figure was dramatically higher, at 85%. The same survey found that people who embraced anti-elite and anti-expert attitudes were more likely to accept coronavirus conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy thinking is rarely isolated. For example, a person who comes to believe that public health officials are secretly manipulating information may be more receptive to claims that vaccines contain hidden dangers. Someone who distrusts pharmaceutical companies may be more receptive to claims that the pandemic was engineered for profit. Someone who believes powerful elites routinely operate in secret may be more receptive to broader conspiracy narratives such as QAnon.

These beliefs can reinforce one another, creating a broader worldview in which institutions, experts and government officials are presumed to be acting deceptively.

The Fauci conspiracy

Because Fauci was highly visible during the pandemic, advising presidents and appearing on television, he quickly became associated with government efforts to control the spread of the virus.

For some Republicans and MAGA activists, and others who distrust the government and scientific institutions, Fauci came to represent lockdowns, masks, vaccines and government mandates.

Anti-vaccine activists incorporated him into broader narratives about pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies. Conspiracists took the story further, portraying Fauci as part of a secret effort to conceal the origins of COVID-19. Extremists connected these claims to older ideas about government tyranny, social control and corrupt elites.

The result was a feedback loop.

Claims were generated in online communities, repeated by political figures and amplified by media personalities, who injected these talking points back into supporters’ social media feeds. The repetition made the claims feel increasingly familiar – and familiarity can be mistaken for evidence.

The lab-leak question is not the same as a conspiracy theory

Asking whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged through either zoonotic spillover, which is when a virus jumps from animals to people, or through a laboratory-related incident is not inherently a conspiracy theory. Scientists and governments have legitimate reasons to investigate the origins of a pandemic.

The World Health Organization’s independent scientific advisory group reported in 2025 that much of the information needed to fully evaluate the competing hypotheses had not been provided by China. It concluded that the available evidence suggests spillover but maintained that the laboratory-leak hypothesis could not be ruled out.

There is, however, a distinction between investigating whether a laboratory accident might have occurred and claiming that scientists created a virus and intentionally released it. That distinction is important in returning to Fauci and the claims raised at the July 29 hearing: Were lawmakers investigating the possibility of an accidental laboratory release, or were they advancing the more conspiratorial idea that scientists deliberately created and released the virus?

The Republican-led House subcommittee argued that U.S. government–funded research may have contributed to the pandemic.

The investigation did not establish that the virus was intentionally manufactured or released.

Today, the scientific question of where SARS-CoV-2 originated remains unresolved. But conspiracy theories can transform the absence of evidence into evidence of concealment.

From fringe theory to political reality

The most consequential feature of conspiracy theories may be their ability to move from one group to another.

A claim can begin in an obscure online community and spread through social media to become a political weapon.

The Fauci hearing demonstrates the culmination of that process. These claims have moved into the formal machinery of government, where they are being amplified by elected officials and federal agencies. A theory’s credibility can increase simply because someone with greater institutional authority has repeated it.

That may be the most important question surrounding Fauci’s hearing: What happens when conspiracy theories acquire the authority of the government?

 

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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European leaders scrambled Saturday to contain the political fallout from a mass migration surge into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, where authorities say roughly 50,000 people crossed from Morocco in an unprecedented two-day rush that left at least 67 people dead.

Spanish officials said crossings largely stopped overnight after Morocco increased enforcement and thousands of migrants voluntarily returned. Spain also began installing a 500-meter floating barrier off Ceuta’s coastline while deploying additional police and military personnel to prevent further crossings.

The humanitarian crisis has quickly become a political one. Italy temporarily reinstated border controls with Spain for one month, while 22 European Union member states called for an emergency discussion on strengthening the bloc’s external borders. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez criticized calls to isolate Spain, arguing the country’s border controls remain intact and warning against measures that could undermine European unity.

Ceuta, along with the nearby Spanish enclave of Melilla, forms the European Union’s only land border with Africa, making it a longstanding flashpoint in debates over migration. While Spain has introduced a pathway to legal residency for some undocumented immigrants already living in the country, officials rejected claims that the policy triggered the latest crossings, instead blaming migrant-smuggling networks and misinformation circulating on social media.

Reuters reported that many migrants who reached Ceuta have already returned to Morocco after encountering overcrowding, food shortages and little prospect of continuing onward into mainland Europe. Spanish officials said migrants who enter Ceuta cannot freely travel into the rest of Spain because identity checks remain in place before any ferry or air travel to the mainland.

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President Donald Trump seized on the crisis Saturday, posting on Truth Social that the scenes in Spain resembled what he claimed occurred under former President Joe Biden and warning that the United States would face an even larger “invasion” if Democrats return to power. Similar claims have circulated widely online, though Spanish officials dispute comparisons to U.S. immigration policy and say the circumstances surrounding the Ceuta crossings are unique to the enclave’s geography and legal status.

The post Europe tightens borders after deadly Ceuta migrant surge appeared first on Salon.com.