☕️ FROZEN ☙ Tuesday, April 15, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump pummels Harvard in a policy prizefight; ADHD’s amphetamine empire exposed by the Times’ trembling 'truth-tellers'; and doctors miss dementia’s dart to the brain, blindfolded by dogma.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Happy Tax Day, too. Or something. Anyway, your hard-hitting roundup today includes: Trump versus Harvard, and Harvard is getting beaten like a red-headed stepchild caught stealing daddy’s best whiskey; new Times limited hangout team strikes again with infuriating admission about ADHD’s industrial-strength lies; and growing epidemic of early-onset Alzheimer’s baffles experts who can’t see a needle if it pricked them in the eyeball.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Like a hamster timidly peeking over the furrow to spot the plow, brave progressive resistance reared its rodent-like head yesterday, as the New York Times ran one of several similarly hysterical stories yesterday headlined, “Trump Administration Will Freeze $2 Billion After Harvard Refuses Demands.” Harvard is standing up to the orange bully! And now, the Times and Friends have begun writing an off-Broadway play about it, featuring poetry, interpretive dance, and a Greek chorus of transgender mimes.

America’s oldest university’s motto is simple: “Veritas,” or “Truth.” But these days, the truth can be so dang complicated. As Groucho Marx might have said, “Harvard has principles. And if you don’t like them, it has others.”

But the truth is, you could run Harvard better than its current management. I will prove it by starting with the end. Near the top of the article, the Times reported “Dr.” Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, said in a brave statement yesterday that, “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” said.

He used the classic rhetorical triad, a grouping of three things that somehow provides an appearance of intellectual heft but is really just a cheap trick that we all use for convenience, economy, and cognitive sloth. (See?) Anyway, Alan complained the Trump Administration was “dictating” (a dictator!): (1) what it can teach, (2) who it can admit and hire, and (3) which areas of study it can pursue. A neat little what-who-which triad.

🔥 The problem is, the Trump Administration’s five-page letter, which was actually linked by the article (but never directly quoted), omits any of President Gerbil’s three claims. In other words, he’s either lying, or he never actually read the letter and he just made all that up out of his feverish imagination. Actually, I beleive he never read it. I think he was terrified of getting infected and assigned the letter —still in the envelope— to a committee of faculty who immediately started recruiting graduate students to form five multidisciplinary teams to each tackle one page. I really think that’s what happened.

But set that micro-controversy aside. The Trump Team’s letter is itself a masterwork of dark comedy, because by about the middle of page two you laughingly begin to realize that there is no way Harvard would ever agree to it, not because of how unreasonable it was, but just the opposite. It was hyper-reasonable.

Which makes the whole fracas into classic Trump 2.0— not only can’t Harvard agree to the terms, but they can’t even talk about the terms, since everyone sane outside academia’s withered-ivy halls would instantly side with the President.

“In recent years,” the letter begins, assuming a high academic tone, “Harvard has failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” It’s beyond me how a country with $40 trillion in debt can afford to chuck billions at universities in annual “grants” that disappear right down the colleges’ memory holes every single time. But whatever. Let’s see what the Trump Team did ask for, shall we?

Here’s a partial list, but enough to give you an idea of how badly out of control Harvard U. actually is:

• “Merit-Based Admissions Reform.”

• “Merit-based hiring reform.”

• “Harvard's plagiarism policy be consistently enforced.”

• “Prevent admitting students hostile to American values and institutions.”

• “Report to federal authorities … any foreign student, including those on visas and with green cards, who commits a conduct violation.”

• “Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring.”

• “Audit programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological political capture.”

• “Discontinue DEI.”

• “Enforce its existing student discipline policies with consistency and impartiality, and without double standards based on identity or ideology.”

• “Intervene and stop disruptions or deplatforming.”

• “Forbid funding of any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment.”

• “Whistleblower Reporting and Protections for those who report noncompliance with the reforms detailed in this letter.”

• “During the reform period, share progress data with the federal government for audit, and on a non-individualized basis with the public.”

• My favorite: “Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.”

In other words, this wasn’t a list of kingly demands. It was a corporate HR memo from Planet Earth. Harvard, come in, Earth People need you.

Despite President Gerbil’s breathless hysteria, nowhere in the letter did the Trump Administration try to tell Harvard (1) what it can teach, (2) who it can admit and hire, or (3) which areas of study it can pursue. You’d think the Times’s fact-checkers might have felt something squirming in their bowels. But no. Instead, the paper excreted a long diatribe about President Gerbil’s flawless courage and his fearless academic integrity.

See? Running universities and major newspapers is easy. You can just bravely make up whatever you need to fit your narrative.

The good news, unmentioned by the Times, is that the Trump Administration’s maximalist but commonsense demands for reform will never, ever be accepted by the University, which means taxpayers will recover a tidy $2.2 billion a year.

More like this, please.

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Oh, the Times. Yesterday it ran its latest long-form, multi-media style exposé, which means it’s time for the latest limited hangout. The astonishing article was topped by a classic posed question in the dumbfounding headline: “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?” As we begin to dive into the grotesque depths of Times’ faux sympathies, keep one question in mind: Why now?

It has been 25 years since the ADHD industry took off like a SpaceX Dragon rocket with an all-male crew. The now-common diagnosis and its even more common drug treatment enjoyed no bigger cheerleader and ardent defender than the New York Times itself. But after twenty-five years of federally subsidized pediatric speed, an eye-watering 23% of boys —nearly 1 in 4— are now taking Ritalin or Adderall for the “condition.”

They’ve cured nothing.

Unsurprisingly, by 2022, 18 million 30+-year-olds were also hooked. Presumably, it’s even more now.

Ritalin and Adderall are pharmaceutical-grade stimulants from the amphetamine family. Researchers have known since the early 2000’s that both drugs have a horrifying side-effect: they stunt kids’ growth. “Children who took Ritalin for an extended period,” the Times reported, perhaps for the first time, “grew less quickly than the nonmedicated children did.” At the end of a 36-month study, patients who had consistently taken stimulant medications were, on average, more than an inch shorter than ones who had never received medication.

In just 36 months.

I will bet a week’s salary that most parents were never told about this Sophie’s Choice of a trade-off when doctors pushed poppers for classroom boredom and mild behavioral issues. But it was right there in the fine print! Nestled between a cartoon and a coupon for more!

💊 That’s not all. Last year, a study in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that even a medium-strength daily dose of Adderall more than tripled a patient’s chance of developing psychosis or mania. A higher dose rocketed the risk to an astonishing 500%.

Prepare to be enraged. The Times blandly reported that, despite decades of study and mountains of prescription amphetamines, the experts still have no theory for how it supposedly works. The only consistent observation seems to be that kids (mostly boys) behavior “improves” once they start warming to the golden glow of chemical stimulus.

Despite the risks and the lack of any discoverable mechanism of effect, WebMD recently advised parents to “problematize” their children’s ADHD to encourage them to take their medicine. “To accept treatment, teens need to feel ADHD as problematic, as a pain in their life that limits and controls them,” the medical website sagely advised. In other words, fear.

Another WebMD article penned by a Harvard researcher advised parents to tolerate horrible side-effects from the treatment. “Parents should know that not all personality changes sparked by medication are negative,” the Harvard professor advised. “If a child known for his sense of humor seems ‘less funny’ on medication, it could be that the medication is properly inhibiting them.”

Or it could be that Harvard is a black hole of failure that should be immediately shut down. Just saying.

💊 Perhaps worst of all, the Times suddenly discovered a legion of long-overlooked studies suggesting that amphetamine treatment for ADHD doesn’t even work. One U. Penn. study gave a series of cognitive tests to students on Ritalin and compared their scores to students not taking the drugs. “The ones who took the medication,” the Times reported, “didn’t do better on any of the tests than the ones who took the placebo, but the ones who took Adderall believed they had done better.”

It tricks you into thinking it’s working. Or at least, you feel good about it not working.

A 2022 Florida study reached a similar conclusion, finding that the Ritalin affected behavior but not academic performance. “Children taking Ritalin worked faster and behaved better in the classroom than those in the placebo group,” the Times admitted. “But they didn’t learn any more than the control group.” The researchers’ conclusions were stark. “Although it has been believed for decades that medication effects on academic seatwork productivity and classroom behavior would translate into improved learning,” the scientists wrote drily, “we found no such translation.”

Worst of all, a 2023 Australian study gave half the kids Ritalin and tested both groups on something called a “knapsack test.” It’s a computer game in which the kids drag digital items in and out of a knapsack trying to maximize the contents’ dollar value, making tradeoffs for weight and size.

The Ritalin kids did worse than the unmedicated students, even though the drugged children looked busier.

“Their choices didn’t make much sense — they just kept pulling random items in and out of the backpack,” the Times said. “To an observer, they appeared to be focused, well behaved, on task,” the paper reported, “but in fact, they weren’t accomplishing anything of much value.”

💊 Where does this leave us? First, I’ll direct your attention to the Times’ medical exposé from January: the horrifying admission that for the same quarter-century, we’ve also been thinking about Alzheimer’s all wrong.

Regular readers will recall that, for 25 years, Alzheimer’s research was stymied by a slavish, public health-enforced commitment to a single study and lone theory that has now been proven wrong. All the pills seniors gobbled up in the meantime only made their deteriorating conditions worse.

Alzheimer’s —like ADHD— has been exploding. It’s a catastrophe wrapped in an apocalypse. Anyone who’s struggled with this horrible disease, or has an afflicted aging relative, knows all too well how devastating the condition is. But pharma only made it worse, and influential doctors kept the train running for their big pharma masters.

Now, three months after the Times’ brutal takedown of Alzheimer’s research, the paper turns its attention to another scientific scandal, ADHD. But why now?

I’ll propose to you it is because they know what’s coming. Trump’s new health secretary Robert Kennedy is refocusing the public health agencies on these boring chronic conditions instead of on boutique, career-making, subsaharan diseases like monkeypox that nobody except a handful of patients gives a rat’s furry toucas about.

Kennedy has also promised to make the agencies’ internal studies public. Disclosure.

In other words, the ADHD scam is teetering on its last legs, and the Times’ cartel patrons know that, full well. It is time, therefore, for them to preemptively confess —science fixes itself!— rather than wait for the inevitable exposure.

True, this is a far cry from accountability. It’s more like arsonists trying to file the insurance claim first. It’s infuriating, it’s not nearly enough, but it’s also a good sign— more Trump Effect.

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The Wall Street Journal ran a troubling story headlined, “Is Covid Rewriting the Rules of Aging? Brain Decline Alarms Doctors.” One word was conspicuously absent, of course: vaccines.

Per the standard media template, the story began with a human-interest anecdote. Todd, 56, is a former Showtime executive who lives in New York City. He was diagnosed with long covid in 2022. He stopped working in 2023 due to disabling brain fog and chronic physical weakness.

The article cited studies, none new, showing troubling rates of early Alzheimer’s syndrome in younger people like Todd who’ve been diagnosed with long covid. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but we’ve previously reviewed other studies suggesting that most long covid diagnoses are actually long vaxx. Some unquantified smaller number of unvaccinated patients also claim the syndrome.

Anyway, the problem seems to be slowly growing worse and —unlike during the pandemic— experts have more questions than answers. “Are long-Covid patients’ cognitive symptoms getting better or regressing?” the paper rhetorically asked. According to experts: “It remains unclear if these changes will persist or worsen over time.” A UT researcher said, “Do they have Alzheimer’s disease? We don’t know.”

Rates of the once-rare disease are increasing slowly but surely: “It’s a four- or fivefold increase in the prevalence.” The UT neurologist thinks it’s uncurable early dementia. “It doesn’t look in older adults that this is a reversible process,” she said.

It’s hitting older adults hardest— but curiously, this time it does not seem like an affliction of the elderly. Three days ago, the Journal ran this related story:

Diana, 80, said she can’t afford to have dementia. “I have some memory problems,” she admitted. “But I can’t think about that too much, because I have a son who needs me quite a bit. I pray a lot.” John-Richard, 40, was diagnosed with Lewy Body Alzheimer’s while attending a California medical school. He quit school and moved in with his parents in Virginia. His father, Herman, 82, installed bed rails to keep John-Richard from falling out of bed at night.

John-Richard’s early onset dementia was so unusual and came on so fast that doctors first misdiagnosed him with a concussion.

The article said nothing about long covid.

I hate to be that guy, but generation-skipping early dementia seems like it could be related less to age generally and more to being working age. In other words, subject to mandates. In other, other words— it’s something with an environmental cause. Something in the environment that has a pointy tip.

We’re mired in a liminal moment. The studies are stacking up, the gag orders have lapsed, but the media still refuses to see the giant, genetically engineered spike protein flailing in the corner. Of course, after serving as narrative enforcers for four years, they have no choice but to studiously ignore the obvious. But when will the dam finally break for good?

Maybe, under new leadership, the public health agencies will finally tackle the biggest unspoken disaster in modern medicine. Remain hopeful. Every single indicator on the dashboard is glowing green. Hang in there.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Scoot back here, mug at the ready, for tomorrow morning’s special delivery of essential news and snarky commentary.

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