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Top Five Huge Stories the Media Buried This Week

Published

8 months ago

8 minute read

#5 – CNN panel lectures America on military “accountability”… and then melts down when Scott Jennings points out that no one was held accountable for the disaster in Afghanistan or Biden’s open border.

NEERA TANDEN: “The military requires accountability. It’s the most accountable organization. You are supposed to be accountable to higher-ups. Politics isn’t supposed to have to do with any of this, and the fact that that’s happening, that they’re just basically saying nothing to do here, is a big problem, I think, for those who believe in accountability.”

@ScottJenningsKY: “I think Republicans aren’t interested in any lectures on accountability in the military after the Biden administration. I mean, the bar for getting rid of a Secretary of Defense is apparently pretty high. You can get 13 people killed and go AWOL and not tell the commander in chief, and that’s not a fireable offense.”

“But these lectures about accountability and national security after letting 10 million people into the country who raped and murdered and committed violent acts and no remorse or accountability.”

NEERA TANDEN: “What are you talking about? They closed the border.”

#4 – Bill Gates says we won’t need humans “for most things.”

During an appearance on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon asked Gates a pretty direct question: “Will we still need humans?”

Gates responded, “Not for most things. We’ll decide … There will be some things that we reserve for ourselves, but in terms of making things and moving things and growing food, over time those will be basically solved problems.”

VIDEO: @TheChiefNerd

#3 – Rep. Jim Jordan hammers NPR CEO Katherine Maher for three straight minutes over political bias, the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up, and NPR’s 87-to-0 Democrat staff ratio.

REP JORDAN: “Is NPR biased?”

MAHER: “I have never seen any political bias.”

JORDAN: “In the DC area, editorial positions at NPR have 87 registered Democrats and 0 Republicans.”

MAHER: “We do not track the voter registration, but I find that concerning.”

JORDAN: “87-0 and you’re not biased?”

MAHER: “I think that is concerning if those numbers are accurate.”

JORDAN: “October 2020, the NYPost had the Hunter Biden laptop story, and one of those 87 Democrat editors said, ‘We don’t want to waste our readers and listeners’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.’ Was that story a pure distraction?”

Video + Transcript via @Kanekoathegreat

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#2 – Utah becomes the first state to officially BAN fluoride in all public drinking water.

For decades, fluoride was accepted as a safe way to prevent tooth decay. Few questioned it.

But last year, in a dramatic legal twist, a federal judge ruled that fluoride may actually lower children’s IQ—and cited evidence that could upend everything we thought we knew.

That ruling sent shockwaves through the public health world.

Judge Edward Chen pointed to scientific studies showing a “high level of certainty” that fluoride exposure “poses a risk” to developing brains.

He ordered the EPA to reexamine its safety standards, warning that the margin for safety may be far too narrow.

At the center of the case: dozens of peer-reviewed studies linking everyday fluoride exposure—even at levels found in U.S. tap water—to reduced intellectual capacity in children.

It wasn’t just one paper. The National Toxicology Program, a branch of the U.S. government, also concluded that higher fluoride levels were “consistently associated” with lower IQ in kids.

They flagged 1.5 mg/L as a risk threshold. Some communities hover right near it.

In response to the growing evidence, Utah passed HB 81, banning all fluoride additives in public water.

The law takes effect May 7. It doesn’t ban fluoride completely. Anyone who wants it can still get it—like any other prescription.

And that’s the point: Utah’s lawmakers say this is about informed consent and personal choice.

This issue is no longer on the fringe. Across the country, cities and towns are quietly rethinking water fluoridation—and some have already pulled out. Utah is the first state to take bold action. It may not be the last.

The conversation surrounding fluoride has shifted from “Is it helpful?” to “Is it safe?” And for the first time in nearly a century, that question is being taken seriously.

VIDEO: @TheChiefNerd

#1 – RFK Jr. Drops Stunning Vaccine Announcement

Kennedy revealed that the CDC is creating a new sub-agency focused entirely on vaccine injuries—a long-overdue shift for patients who’ve spent years searching for answers without any support from the government.

“We’re incorporating an agency within CDC that is going to specialize in vaccine injuries,” Kennedy announced.

“These are priorities for the American people. More and more people are suffering from these injuries, and we are committed to having gold-standard science make sure that we can figure out what the treatments are and that we can deliver the best treatments possible to the American people.”

For years, the vaccine-injured have felt ignored or dismissed, as public health agencies refused to even acknowledge the problem. Now, there’s finally an initiative underway to investigate their injuries and to provide support.

Thanks for reading! This weekly roundup takes time and care to put together—and I do my best to make it your go-to source for the stories that matter most but rarely get the attention they deserve.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

UK Government “Resist” Program Monitors Citizens’ Online Posts

Published on November 24, 2025

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Let’s begin with a simple question. What do you get when you cross a bloated PR department with a clipboard-wielding surveillance unit?
The answer, apparently, is the British Government Communications Service (GCS). Once a benign squad of slogan-crafting, policy-promoting clipboard enthusiasts, they’ve now evolved (or perhaps mutated) into what can only be described as a cross between MI5 and a neighborhood Reddit moderator with delusions of grandeur.
Yes, your friendly local bureaucrat is now scrolling through Facebook groups, lurking in comment sections, and watching your aunt’s status update about the “new hotel down the road filling up with strangers” like it’s a scene from Homeland. All in the name of “societal cohesion,” of course.
Once upon a time, the GCS churned out posters with perky slogans like Stay Alert or Get Boosted Now, like a government-powered BuzzFeed.
But now, under the updated “Resist” framework (yes, it’s actually called that), the GCS has been reprogrammed to patrol the internet for what they’re calling “high-risk narratives.”
Not terrorism. Not hacking. No, according to The Telegraph, the new public enemy is your neighbor questioning things like whether the council’s sudden housing development has anything to do with the 200 migrants housed in the local hotel.
It’s all in the manual: if your neighbor posts that “certain communities are getting priority housing while local families wait years,” this, apparently, is a red flag. An ideological IED. The sort of thing that could “deepen community divisions” and “create new tensions.”
This isn’t surveillance, we’re told. It’s “risk assessment.” Just a casual read-through of what that lady from your yoga class posted about a planning application. The framework warns of “local parental associations” and “concerned citizens” forming forums.
And why the sudden urgency? The new guidance came hot on the heels of a real incident, protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, following the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian migrant.
Now, instead of looking at how that tragedy happened or what policies allowed it, the government’s solution is to scan the reaction to it.
What we are witnessing is the rhetorical equivalent of chucking all dissent into a bin labelled “disinformation” and slamming the lid shut.
The original Resist framework was cooked up in 2019 as a European-funded toolkit to fight actual lies. Now, it equates perfectly rational community concerns about planning, safety, and who gets housed where with Russian bots and deepfakes. If you squint hard enough, everyone starts to look like a threat.
Local councils have even been drafted into the charade. New guidance urges them to follow online chatter about asylum seekers in hotels or the sudden closure of local businesses.
One case study even panics over a town hall meeting where residents clapped. That’s right. Four hundred people clapped in support of someone they hadn’t properly Googled first. This, we’re told, is dangerous.
So now councils are setting up “cohesion forums” and “prebunking” schemes to manage public anger. Prebunking. Like bunking, but done in advance, before you’ve even heard the thing you’re not meant to believe.
It’s the equivalent of a teacher telling you not to laugh before the joke’s even landed.
Naturally, this is all being wrapped in the cosy language of protecting democracy. A government spokesman insisted, with a straight face: “We are committed to protecting people online while upholding freedom of expression.”
Because let’s be real, this isn’t about illegal content or safeguarding children. It’s about managing perception. When you start labeling ordinary gripes and suspicions as “narratives” that need “countering,” what you’re really saying is: we don’t trust the public to think for themselves.
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Focal Points

STUDY: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts Induce Measurable “Brain Rot”

Published on November 23, 2025

By

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH's avatar Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

In 2024, “brain rot” went from an online meme to the Oxford Word of the Year.

Doomscrolling, zombie scrolling, and dopamine-driven streams of low-quality content are producing measurable cognitive impairment across an entire generation.

‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.

The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Now, a peer-reviewed paper titled, Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review, confirms that brain rot is real: the digital environment is chemically, cognitively, and psychologically degrading the developing human brain. And the damage is measurable.

According to the study, brain rot isn’t a meme. It’s a documented state of cognitive atrophy, driven by overstimulation, dopamine feedback loops, and nonstop exposure to low-quality digital content.

The authors conducted a rapid review, systematically analyzing 381 studies, filtering to 35 high-quality papers published between 2023–2024. Here’s what they found:

The Core Mechanism: Overstimulation + Dopamine Feedback Loops

The review shows that young people now average 6.5 hours per day online — primarily on algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and endless-scroll feeds engineered for split-second novelty.

Most of the content involves rapid, low-information stimuli: ultrashort videos, memes, reaction clips, and trivial entertainment fragments that provide novelty without cognitive substance.

These platforms deliver rapid bursts of artificially rewarding stimuli, creating a cycle of:

  • Constant cognitive overstimulation

    The brain never enters a “rest” mode or deeper thought state.

  • Weakening of working memory

    Information is consumed too quickly to be consolidated.

  • Fragmented attention networks

    Short-form content trains the mind to expect constant novelty.

  • Difficulty processing long or complex information

    Deep reading and sustained focus become neurologically harder.

  • Mental fatigue & reduced executive function

    Chronic overstimulation taxes the prefrontal cortex — the center of planning, reasoning, and self-regulation.

The study describes this as a shift from healthy, top-down cognitive control to bottom-up, dopamine-seeking impulsivity.

Doomscrolling: Chronic Exposure to Negative, Threatening, or Grotesque Content

Many people casually use the term, but the study provides a precise functional definition:

Doomscrolling = the compulsive consumption of emotionally negative or threat-based content.

Doomscrolling produces:

  • Persistent anxiety and hypervigilance
    The brain remains locked in a threat-detection mode.
  • Rumination loops
    Negative information gets replayed mentally.
  • Physiological stress responses
    Chronic cortisol elevation impairs cognition.
  • Reduced memory formation
    Stress disrupts hippocampal consolidation.
  • Attentional fragmentation
    The brain becomes primed for scanning, not focusing.

According to the review, doomscrolling directly impairs working memory, emotional regulation, and sustained attention, accelerating cognitive wear-and-tear.

Zombie Scrolling: The Dissociative “Mindless Drift” That Damages Cognition

Doomscrolling is emotionally intense. Zombie scrolling is emotionally empty.

Zombie scrolling = passive, intentionless, dissociative swiping through content with no goal, awareness, or engagement.

Zombie scrolling is associated with:

  • Dissociation
    The mind drifts, reducing present-moment awareness.
  • Working-memory depletion
    Mindless consumption offers no cognitive stimulation.
  • Reduced attentional control
    The brain becomes conditioned to effortless, low-value input.
  • Emotional numbing & detachment
    Pleasure/reward pathways become desensitized.
  • Diminished cognitive engagement
    The brain stops initiating deeper thought patterns.

The review notes that zombie scrolling may be even more insidious because users don’t feel stressed, so they underestimate the damage — yet the cognitive decline accumulates quietly over time.

Preclinical Dementia Signatures Are Appearing in Younger Generations

A striking findings of the review is that digital-era cognitive decline now mirrors several early dementia–like neurobiological patterns. Across neuroimaging and behavioral studies, excessive digital exposure is linked to reduced hippocampal engagement, producing shallow, fragmented memory formation rather than durable consolidation.

At the same time, prefrontal cortex function—which governs planning, inhibition, and decision-making—shows measurable degradation under chronic multitasking and rapid-fire media input.

This constant overstimulation imposes a chronic cognitive load on the neocortex, creating patterns consistent with accelerated cognitive aging. Notably, several longitudinal findings suggest an elevated lifetime risk of cognitive decline, indicating these effects may not be transient. These changes are well-documented through fMRI and controlled studies included in the review, demonstrating that preclinical neurodegenerative signatures are already emerging in younger populations.

Brain Rot: A Real Neurocognitive Syndrome

The study shows a clear, repeatable pattern: excessive digital exposure to low-quality content degrades working memory, sustained attention, executive function, problem-solving, and emotional regulation. Constant notifications and rapid content switching impair information holding and focus, while overstimulation weakens planning, self-control, and cognitive flexibility.

Both doomscrolling’s emotional overload and zombie scrolling’s emotional emptiness destabilize the central nervous system, producing a more rigid, impulsive, and cognitively inefficient brain. Adolescents exhibit the most severe deficits, underscoring the risk of long-term impact.

The evidence confirms brain rot is a real, emerging early, accelerating quickly, and consuming a generation.

This is one of the core reasons why cognitive disability is now a public health concern in the United States. Cognitive impairment is skyrocketing with no end in sight:

Widespread cognitive decline before adulthood may soon become the norm as AI-generated “brain rot” content begins to drastically proliferate.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

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