In the mental health industry, one talks of “anxiety disorder” and “attention deficit disorder” and “mood disorder.”

The underlying implication? These diseases or disorders are the problem. Get rid of the problem, and you’ll be fine.

Cure the disease; and there will be no more symptoms.

But what if the things we call the disease are actually … just the symptoms?

Nobody ever seems to ask: Aren’t these disorders consequences of underlying problems? Are what we call mental disorders or diseases the RESULT of something that’s causing them?

Maybe what we call mental disorders are the result of mistaken thinking or self-defeating behaviors, accumulated over time. When you do the same wrong thing over and over again, and then get a poor result — lots of anxiety, or a downcast mood — maybe the problem is in your actions, choices or thinking. The mood or anxiety problem? That’s just the result.

For example, when you love someone who doesn’t love you back, or when you love someone who defines love as power and control (which aren’t love), then you eventually end up either extremely frightened or extremely sad. A psychiatrist will say, “You’ve got mental illness. You have a disease called depression.” Or anxiety disorder.

But doesn’t this mistake the symptom for the cause? Doesn’t labeling and conceptualizing things this way distract a person from the fact that he or she has more control over his or her resulting emotional state than the psychiatric industry assumes?

I know these are complex matters. But what troubles me most is that nobody even explores these questions.

I know the status quo represents an excellent deal for the mental health industry and anyone else invested (financially or ideologically or psychologically) in the status quo of looking at everything as a disease or disorder rather than error.

But I don’t know how good a deal this is for the person in pain or confusion.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“Social justice” is not voluntary. It’s enforced by law. Later, by gunpoint. Ultimately, by prison camps.

Social justice is a secular theology believed by elite leftists who do not practice it, but impose its absurdity on regular people. It always ends in bloodshed, impoverishment and despair.

*****

“Affordability” is the mantra that has everyone under some kind of concept-numbing sedation.

So, affordability matters more than liberty, choice, competition, independence, prosperity, taxes under 90 percent, free speech, gun rights, borders, fighting violent crime, better quality of life for your kids than you had, freedom from nuclear blackmail ….

Seriously, America? A slightly lower gas price (which won’t happen because of the $50 trillion in spending socialists have planned) matters more than your core freedom?

*****

President Trump’s judges in their 30s outnumber Biden’s and Obama’s. Trump has appointed 31 federal judges in their 30s at the time of appointment across his two terms, with at least two more nominees in that age group pending, far more than his predecessors, a Politico analysis of government data found. Appointments are for life. (Newsmax, 10-4-26)

A ray of hope. But if federal judges are like Supreme Court justices, then the conservatives vote far less consistently than the leftist judges. And all leftist judges are openly, ruthlessly partisan. Conservatives can be all over the map. On the Supreme Court they vote leftist half the time, while leftists never deviate from the Party line, which is always anti-liberty, anti-Constitution. Time will tell … Assuming that the totalitarians now taking control of the Democratic Party don’t establish an outright dictatorship in the coming few years.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Tennessee didn’t just fail to execute Christa Pike, argues anesthesiologist and intensive care doctor Joel Zivot in a New York Times opinion piece—it exposed what lethal injection really is. Zivot, hired as a medical expert by Pike’s legal team, says he warned that her small veins and medical history made a botched execution more likely. On Wednesday, pentobarbital was injected into her veins; when the first dose didn’t stop her heart, a second was given. Her arms turned purple, her lawyers say, and she reported extreme pain before an ambulance was finally called more than an hour after the process began. “In a matter of hours,” Zivot writes, “she had gone from a prisoner the state was trying to kill to a patient doctors were trying to save.”

Pike is now in an intensive care unit, unconscious, and on a ventilator, with doctors treating what they would describe as a poisoning. Zivot argues that lethal injection is a staged imitation of medicine that reliably risks pain and respiratory distress, citing autopsies showing fluid-filled lungs and prior botched Tennessee executions. “Gov. Bill Lee has said that as far as he knows, the Department of Correction followed its protocol exactly,” writes Zivot. “I take him at his word. That is the problem. Lethal injection failures are not glitches; they are features of the process.” If Pike survives, he notes, physicians “will hand her back to the state that may try to kill her again.” For Zivot’s full argument, read the piece in the New York Times.

Polly Davis Doig, The Newser

American higher education is in retreat. It’s shrinking. The for-sale signs have gone up. It’s time for “inventory reduction.” Forty-nine colleges have closed since 2020. Forty others have merged with neighbors. The Huron Consulting Group says that 400 colleges are at risk of closing in the next decade. The prospect of insolvency has now moved beyond small colleges. Larger ones are closing programs and laying off faculty.

Not counting community colleges, trade schools, online-only outfits and clandestine thinkatoriums, some 2,700 four-year institutions are currently authorized to hand out college degrees in the US. That compares with 4,150 licensed hot dog stands in New York City alone and 267,000 licensed massage parlors across the country. The market for hot dogs and massages is holding steady.

The market for college degrees? Not so much. It is the old story of more supply than demand: too few students for too many seats. People who build things imagine customers will keep coming forever, until they don’t. In the 1930s, 16 major railroads folded and in the 1970s, 23 more ground to a halt. All was not lost. Americans ended up with some excellent bike paths.

At the top of the list of higher education’s woes is a demographic cliff. During the 2008 recession, young couples became baby-averse. The birthrate plunged and stayed low. Those children who were never conceived would now be freshmen, and the system built to educate them finds itself like a large bus carrying a handful of passengers.

The cost of running the bus doesn’t decline in sync with the loss of riders. Fixed expenses don’t like falling revenues. Moreover, the dearth of children will continue for at least 15 more years. Colleges can’t wait it out.

Higher education knew this was coming and tried to offset it by recruiting more students from abroad and cajoling more Americans unsuited to college to enroll anyway. The ditching of SATs at 90 percent of the institutions marked the advent of the enrollment-at-any-cost era. The gains were marginal and the cost to academic reputation was large.

There are other reasons why college enrollment is in crisis. For one thing, Americans of all political persuasions no longer trust colleges and universities as institutions. The latest Gallup Poll shows that 77 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of Democrats distrust American higher education – a figure that continues to grow.

The distrust comes from the cratering value of the education they provide. Most colleges have become sandboxes for indolent students. The teachers pretend to teach, the students pretend to learn and everybody gets an A. It isn’t all the teachers’ fault. They have to deal with students who have been haphazardly recruited and often subjected to 12 years of “Social Emotional Leaning.” The majority are “book virgins” who have reached college without ever reading an entire work cover to cover. They aren’t going to start with The Republic.

But as teaching standards have fallen, tuition and expenses have surged. Americans now carry a total of $1.863 trillion in student-loan debt. That’s the second largest sum of consumer debt, behind home mortgages. A house, however, has intrinsic value. A college degree is worth only what the graduate can make of it. Student-loan debt impedes graduates who want to get married or change jobs. It cannot be defaulted on. It can linger even into one’s retirement years.

Then there’s the matter of waste and bloat. More than half the salaried employees of colleges and universities are now in “student services” rather than education. What students get for their tuition dollar is a full range of counseling, stroking, reassurance and diversion from the actual acquisition of knowledge and skills.

If the students can’t be relied on to read more than a page or two per week, what can a professor do? He, or more likely she, can profess. Teaching students about racism, sexism, colonialism and the myriad forms of injustice embedded in “late-stage capitalism” is one approach. The list of the top 20 most-assigned college texts incudes The Communist Manifesto and Edward Said’s Orientalism, but the real story is not what books are assigned, but what the professors communicate in class.

Wokeness isn’t in the syllabus; it’s in the air. Gender dynamics also play a role. More than 60 percent of undergraduate students are women. Men increasingly turn away from college as something that doesn’t meet their educational and career goals. They are also turned off by the high degree of bias against men in both the curriculum and campus culture.

Besides, only 17.8 percent of posted jobs even require a bachelor’s degree or higher. More than half list no educational requirements at all. Indeed, with all the debt and opportunity cost now involved, a college degree can be an impediment to the start of a promising career, not counting hot dog provider or masseuse.

AI threatens the entire edifice. Artificial intelligence has made it child’s play to avoid reading assigned texts or writing essays on assigned topics. Many faculty members have capitulated, seeing no way to resist the tide. Some have enthusiastically embraced it as a new way of learning. AI has also dented the proposition that a college degree is an all-purpose, adaptable credential for employment. Some employers still think a college degree testifies to useful knowledge and skills, but they will soon learn better.

This is no reason to despair. These institutions have been making themselves obsolete for a long time. Better not to get in their way.

Peter Wood is the President of the National Association of Scholars. He is author of 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now.

It’s October and a new academic year is underway. In Britain, students are taking diversity classes; in France, they are rioting. And in America, they are panicking about campus rape culture. Plus ça change…

The legacy of the almost decade-old Me Too movement is that we ‘believe all women’ but, as the Cornell case shows, sometimes reality is more complex

The case of the “Cornell Seven” has been making headlines across the US this week after a female student, known only as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was drugged and raped by seven male students in the Chi Phi university fraternity house in October 2024.

At first glance, the facts are horrific. A woman, who was 20 years old at the time, claims she was coerced into taking drugs and abused, assaulted and raped by a group of young men. One of those present sent a crude Snapchat message advertising free sex and inviting others to join in. Traumatized, Doe reported her attack to the university police, who refused to prosecute. A campus disciplinary committee took up Doe’s case and, after a hearing, expelled two students, but others, according to her lawsuit, were “afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays” (a claim the university denies). This weak response is, apparently, behind Doe’s latest attempt to secure justice.

Now outrage at details of the attack, and Cornell’s handling of the situation, has been fueled by the university newspaper naming the accused men. The retrial may not have begun, but activists and celebrities have picked sides. This week, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to students and condemned a “culture of rape” at elite institutions. Doe, she complained, “had to lose her education, and those men were protected by an institution and granted an Ivy League degree as a reward. Never again.” Hollywood icon Florence Pugh told her 10.8 million Instagram followers that she felt “uneasy and sick and anxious” about the “horrific act that happened at Cornell College in 2024.” “This makes me feel enraged,” she has added this week, “as it should every person on this earth.”

For feminists like Pugh and AOC, the Cornell case is straightforward: a traumatized young woman bravely fighting for justice against the men who raped her and an establishment that let them get away with it. But scratch the surface, and things are more complex.

Three weeks passed between the night of Doe’s alleged attack and her decision to inform campus police that she had been sexually assaulted and coerced into taking ketamine. Newly released files compiled as part of the university’s investigation reveal that during this time, Doe told her roommates what had happened, but did not describe herself as a rape victim. The next day, she told her sorority mentor that rumors were circulating that she was a “slut” before adding with a laugh that “unfortunately they are true.” When one of the men she would go on to accuse of assaulting her messaged to apologize for how the evening had panned out, she replied: “At the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.” The pair exchanged more friendly messages in the days that followed. Only as campus gossip grew did Doe begin to see herself as a rape victim.

Anger at the police for deciding not to prosecute may also be misguided. Papers now seen by UnHerd include Doe’s initial statement, in which she says that she agreed to have sex with two men, and consented to taking drugs, including snorting ketamine off the erect penis of one of the accused and allowing others to snort drugs off her naked body. By the end of the evening, Doe, now more intoxicated, claims she was aware of having sex with other men but could not “remember how it started.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the police decided her behavior met the legal standard for voluntary consent, and there were insufficient grounds for bringing a prosecution.

Neither is the subsequent disciplinary hearing, carried out by the university, a straightforward story of male privilege. All seven men faced very serious accusations in what has since been described as a “kangaroo court.” Two of the men, found guilty by the university, were eventually suspended from the university. Yet, in her initial statement, Doe describes one of the men involved as struggling to maintain an erection and needing a “nap,” and another as “dry-heaving” during their encounter. It is hard not to conclude that Doe and these two men were intoxicated, yet only the woman was deemed unable to consent.

Another man, Scott Kretzschmar, stood accused of sexually assaulting Doe by snorting ketamine off her naked body. He protested his innocence and provided the results of a drug test, which proved negative for the drug. Yet, after being tried over a Zoom call, during which his lawyer noticed that one committee member was apparently in a car and driving during the proceedings, he was found guilty of attempted sexual exploitation, a charge he says he did not even know he was facing.

These new details cast doubt on the narrative now being promoted by Doe’s celebrity backers. The legacy of the almost decade-old Me Too movement is that we “believe all women” but, as the Cornell case shows, sometimes reality is more complex, and we need to think critically. Rape is horrific and undoubtedly utterly devastating for the victim. But false allegations must also be taken seriously.

Rather than rushing to pass judgment on the Cornell Seven, we should ask why men and women are held to different standards on consent, and why university disciplinary committees should play any role at all in trying such serious accusations as rape. 

Joanna Williams, The Spectator

The Red-Green alliance of leftists and Muslims is staging a show of force, rioting in the streets of France. Pay attention, we’re next.

The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.

The unrest, which quickly spread from the suburbs of Paris to encompass much of the country, were a stark contrast to the scenes just a few days earlier when Pope Leo XIV drew massive crowds at every stop on his four-day papal visit. Some 800,000 people lined the Avenue des Champs-Élysées for an open-air Mass in Paris, catching the media and civil authorities by surprise. France is supposed to be a secular country, after all.

But the pope’s popularity on the one hand, and on the other, the riots that erupted across France a few days after his departure, illustrate the extent to which France today is not a single country or nation. It is not one people. There is ancient France, the true France, which despite the French Revolution and state-enforced secularism is still deeply Catholic, “the eldest daughter of the Church.” That is the France that showed up for Pope Leo.

The other France is the one we saw rioting in the streets last week. News reports said the unrest began in Créteil, a suburb of Paris, over the poor condition of the public schools, and that disaffected high schoolers, fed up with overcrowded classes and dilapidated buildings, took to the streets spontaneously. From there, the rioting supposedly spread organically across the entire country in a matter of days.

There are a few problems with this narrative, beginning with the images and footage of the riots posted all over social media. What we see are not protests of the state of public education, but the wanton destruction of schools, violent attacks on firefighters and police and even teachers, and all the indications of central organization and planning.

Among the “protesters,” we don’t see a broad cross-section of French society but overwhelmingly nonwhite males, immigrants and the children of immigrants. The barricades are being raised largely by Muslims of North African and Middle Eastern descent. Outside many schools, students weren’t chanting about funding cuts or classroom conditions, they were chanting “we are antifascists” and other such slogans. In Marseille, rioters flew the flag of Algeria and Hamas, not the tricolor. It was the same at a number of high schools that saw rioting. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on, and who is behind the unrest.

This is the Red-Green alliance of the socialist/Antifa left and Muslim immigrants, operationalized to bring the country to its knees through widespread rioting ahead of national elections next year. Indeed, the office of France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, on Friday made public that French intelligence is assessing the riots as orchestrated by proxies of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), or LFI. Mélenchon, who has denied LFI’s involvement, is running for president.

In short, what is happening in France is that the communists and the Muslim migrants are joining forces, testing their strength on the eve of national elections. It might be illegal to say so in France, but these are ethnic riots, a show of force by unassimilated Muslim migrants and their hard-left revolutionary allies, who believe they are strong enough to overpower the native majority.

France has always been a tangle of contradictions and a center of spiritual conflict. It was the heart of Catholic Europe but also the cradle of revolutionary terror. It has been both the defender of Christendom and the Catholic Church’s greatest enemy, home of both the Jacobins and the Vendée. Today it is the same: a nation whose majority is still defined by its Catholic faith and heritage, but whose leaders have opened the country to civilizational enemies from the Muslim World that seek to destroy the true France and replace it with something else.

But this isn’t just about France. The events unfolding across the Atlantic should cause alarm to us here in America, because the same forces at work there are at work here. An alliance of leftist and Muslim immigrants are emerging as a potent political force in the United States. This alliance is responsible for elevating people like Zohran Mamdani to the mayorship of New York City. It’s responsible for the U.S. Senate candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

Muslim immigrants to the West of course do not share everything in common with the radical left. Especially on issues like women’s right, transgenderism, gay marriage and the sexual revolution in general, they are not aligned. But those are disagreements for another day. For now, they are aligned above all in their desire to tear down western institutions and the Christian faith on which they were built.

What that will look like in America we have yet to see in full. But if you want to get a rough idea, look at the riots in France. If we don’t put an end to Muslim immigration, that’s what our future holds.

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

Washington — Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who represented Illinois for two decades in Congress and was jailed for violating banking laws, has died, a coroner in Illinois said. He was 84.

Both the longest-serving Republican House speaker and the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to serve a prison sentence, Hastert’s stunning fall from grace came in 2016, when he was sentenced to 15 months in prison on charges related to his concealment of hush money payments made to cover up his sexual abuse of teenage boys during his time as a high school wrestling coach.

Kendall County Coroner Jacquie Purcell confirmed Monday that Hastert died at his home over the weekend due to natural causes. No further details were given.

Born in 1942 in Aurora, Illinois, Hastert grew up in a farming community. He went on to graduate from Wheaton College, where he received a degree in economics, before earning a teaching degree from Northern Illinois University. Hastert married Jean Kahl in 1973. The couple had two sons.

Hastert worked as a teacher in Illinois for 16 years while coaching wrestling. In 1976, he was named Illinois Coach of the Year. Four decades later, he would admit to sexually abusing boys during his time as a coach.

Hastert then served in the Illinois legislature, before going on to be elected to represent Illinois’ 14th district in the U.S. House in 1986.

Hastert served in Congress from 1987 to 2007. With the mentorship of House Minority Leader Robert. H Michel, Hastert’s profile grew among the GOP ranks, and in 1995, he became chief deputy whip. When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stepped down in 1998, Hastert became the conference’s second choice for his successor, following Rep. Bob Livingston’s decision to step aside amid a scandal over extra-marital affairs.

Known as the “accidental speaker,” Hastert would go on to become the longest-serving Republican speaker in history. During his tenure, Hastert, who had been a vocal critic of the Clinton administration, worked closely with former President George W. Bush on his policy agenda.

Among Hastert’s most enduring imprints on the chamber is the rule that bears his name, which informally requires that the House vote only on measures that have a majority of support from the majority party in the chamber. The rule, which has faced criticism for making Congress more partisan, has posed hurdles for Republican House leadership in recent years.

After House Republicans lost the majority in the 2006 midterm elections, Hastert opted to leave leadership, before resigning from Congress in 2007.

Dennis Hastert Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert on his way to the House floor to make his farewell address to Congress on Nov. 15, 2007. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Hastert became a lobbyist and consultant after leaving office. In 2013, the FBI and IRS began investigating the former speaker surrounding suspicions that he was illegally structuring bank transactions. In 2015, Hastert was indicted for structuring bank transactions to evade reporting requirements and making false statements to the FBI.

Hastert pleaded guilty in 2015 to violating banking laws by making repeated large cash withdrawals, which were revealed to be going to one of his victims. During the hearing, Hastert admitted to sexually abusing boys during his time as their wrestling coach. At his sentencing, U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin called Hastert a “serial child molester,” and sentenced him to 15 months in prison, a $250,000 fine and ordered him to participate in a sex offender program. Hastert was not charged with sex-related crimes, as the statutes of limitations had expired. He served 13 months in a federal prison before his release in 2017.

Zachary Farden, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said after Hastert was sentenced that there are “no winners in any of this.”

“Mr. Hastert’s legend and legacy are gone, and in its place are a broken, humiliated man,” Farden said. “That is how it should be.”

Kaia Hubbard, CBS News

The battle to control the House of Representatives has become more competitive, as the Democratic Party’s lead over Republicans has decreased for the second week in a row.

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Email The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that if the elections for Congress were held today, 47% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Democratic candidate, while 44% would vote for the Republican. Four percent (4%) say they would vote for some other candidate and another four percent (4%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The net advantage for Democrats has decreased since last week, when they led by five points, 48% to 43%.

The week before that, Democrats led by eight points. The position for Republicans is now a net six points worse than before the November 2024 election, when they led by three points (48% to 45%) and won just a razor-thin House majority.

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The survey of 1,794 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on September 24 and 27-30, 2026 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

The Democrats’ lead is due to a nine-point margin among independents. Eighty-seven percent (87%) of Democrats would vote for their own party’s candidate in the next congressional elections, compared to 89% of Republicans who would vote for the GOP candidate. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 42% would vote for Democrats and 33% for Republicans, while 12% say they would vote for third-party congressional candidates and 13% are undecided.

The “gender gap” is a net eight points. Women voters prefer Democrats by a 48% to 42% margin, while men favor Republicans, 47% to 45%.

Forty-four percent (44%) of whites, 70% of black voters, 42% of Hispanics and 31% of other minorities would vote for the Democratic candidate, while 48% of whites, 16% of black voters, 50% of Hispanics and 45% of other minorities would vote Republican.

Democrats lead by 22 points, 54% to 32%, among voters under 30, while Republicans have a 10-point lead, 53% to 43%, among those 65 and older.

Ninety-five percent (95%) of self-identified Very Liberal voters favor Democrats, while 79% of Very Conservative voters would vote Republican. Among moderate voters, Democrats lead by 40 points, 62% to 22%.

Eighty-five percent (85%) of those who voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election would vote for Democratic congressional candidates, while 84% of Donald Trump supporters would vote Republican.

Left-wing commentator Hasan Piker isn’t familiar to many voters, but his support of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is overwhelmingly rejected.

Democrat state Rep. Josh Turek maintains a four-point lead over U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson in the race to fill the Iowa Senate seat vacated by the retirement of Republican Sen. Joni Ernst.

Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

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Rasmussen Reports

Death rates among young Americans have surged dramatically, with the mortality rate for adults aged 25 to 44 jumping 71.2% between 2010 and 2021, the largest increase of any age group.  This rise is driven by a combination of external causes, such as drug overdose, and early-onset diseases.

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for young adults and have multiplied sevenfold since 1999.  Suicides have risen more than 40% since 2000.  Homicides increased 75.5% between 2014 and 2021 and vehicle accidents rose 43.5% during the same period.

Deaths from diabetes, hypertensive disease and alcoholic liver disease have also spiked sharply.  Deaths from alcohol-related mental health disorders more than tripled between 2010 and 2023.

The following are extracts from an article published by Study Finds.  You can read the full article HERE.

Death rates for Americans between 25 and 44 years old jumped 71.2% in just eleven years, rising from about 140 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 to 239 per 100,000 by 2021. No other age group came anywhere close to that surge. Overdoses, suicides, car crashes and chronic diseases appearing at increasingly younger ages are now cutting down people in the prime of their lives.

Steven H. Woolf, a physician and researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, published the analysis in The Milbank Quarterly. He combined data from the United Nations, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and a US mortality database to show how far American life expectancy has fallen behind the rest of the developed world and, increasingly, much of the developing world too.

By 2023, US life expectancy ranked 38th among countries with populations over 1 million, trailing not just Western Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia but also Chile, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Israel, South Korea and several Persian Gulf nations. Sixty countries had a lower risk of a person dying before age 40 than the United States did. That gap didn’t open overnight. It has been widening since the 1990s, and it sped up sharply after 2010.

What’s Driving the Rise in Death Rates Among Young Americans

Drug overdoses top the list. Among adults 25 to 44, the overdose death rate rose sevenfold after 1999, from about 7.7 per 100,000 to more than 54 per 100,000, and surpassed circulatory diseases (such as heart disease and stroke) in 2015 to become the leading cause of death in that age group. Suicide rates for this same group are higher than in any other age bracket and climbed more than 40% between 2000 and 2023. Homicides rose 75.5% between 2014 and 2021, and deaths from car crashes and other transportation accidents rose 43.5% over that same stretch.

What surprised even close followers of these trends is how much of the damage now comes from disease rather than injury. Deaths from diabetes and other metabolic and hormone-related illnesses rose nearly a quarter between 2010 and 2019 among young adults. Deaths tied to liver damage from drinking more than doubled between 2010 and 2023. Deaths from alcohol-related mental health disorders more than tripled in that same window. Even high blood pressure, historically a problem of later adulthood, saw its death rate more than double among 25- to 44-year-olds between 2000 and 2023.

Middle-aged adults, 45 to 64, saw many of the same patterns: rising deaths from drug overdoses, liver damage from drinking and diseases of the brain and nervous system, along with a covid-19 death rate that nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021 even after vaccines became available. Older adults largely avoided these steep increases, though deaths from brain and nerve diseases doubled between 2000 and 2023, and deaths from endocrine disorders and suicide also climbed.

Note from The Exposé: We have to question what “covid-19 death rate” means.  If the covid death rate doubled in 2021, after the mass vaccination campaigns began, was it due to covid? 

Mass covid vaccination began in the United States on 14 December 2020, when the first doses of vaccine were administered to healthcare workers and long-term care residents.  By 19 April 2021, all US states had opened vaccine eligibility to residents aged 16 and over.

President Joe Biden set an immediate goal of administering 100 million vaccine doses within his first 100 days in office and signed an executive order to increase vaccine supplies. This goal was met on 19 March 2021. On n 25 March 2021, he announced he would increase the goal to 200 million within his first 100 days in office. This goal was reached on 21 April 2021. By 4 July 2021, 67% of the United States’ adult population had received at least one dose.

Woolf’s study states:

“COVID-19 mortality among US adults ages 45–64 almost doubled between 2020 and 2021 (rising from 64.51 to 122.66 per 100,000).7 It was not until 2022 and 2023 that COVID-19 mortality at ages 45–64 began to decrease (to 37.14 and 5.16 per 100,000, respectively).”

Does it seem like a “safe and effective” vaccine was given to at least 67% of the American adult population?

Rhoda Wilson, The Expose

The U.S. military fired upon a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean Sea on Oct. 4, killing four.

“Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking,” the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said in a press statement announcing the strike. “The operation killed four narco-terrorists.”

Along with the statement, SOUTHCOM shared footage purporting to show the moment the suspect vessel was bombed.

The military command did not provide any additional identifying information about those killed aboard the vessel or their affiliations.

Since early 2025, the State Department has designated several Latin American drug trafficking cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

In September 2025, U.S. forces launched a new campaign of lethal strikes on suspected drug boats, dubbed Operation Southern Spear. In the past year, U.S. forces have claimed responsibility for at least 70 such lethal strikes in the Caribbean and East Pacific, killing more than 200 people.

Amid this ongoing campaign of strikes on suspected drug boats, the United States has led in the formation of a new multinational effort known as the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. Eighteen Western Hemisphere nations have since partnered with the United States on this countertrafficking effort.

“We’re definitely expanding our presence and our footprint in Central and South America with partners,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told reporters on Oct. 3, while visiting the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Hegseth said the United States has expanded options for its military posture in Central and South America after capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a special operations raid on Jan. 3.

He said growing partnerships with Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama have also strengthened U.S. influence in the region.

“We are at war with the drug cartels … the president has been clear about that,” Hegseth said. “So, we’re going to posture and base as necessary to ensure that we have our foot on the pedal and are taking the fight to those ISIS and Al Qaeda of our hemisphere.”

While President Donald Trump and other members of his administration have said strikes on suspected drug boats are a necessary measure in a war against narcoterrorism, some critics have raised concerns about the legality of the strikes and the lack of clarity about who has been killed in these operations.

In January, the families of two Trinidadian nationals who have been missing since October 2025 filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the United States. The plaintiffs alleged the two missing men had been working as migrant laborers in neighboring Venezuela, and were likely killed by U.S. forces in an Oct. 14 strike as they tried to return to Trinidad and Tobago. “Congress and the American people have yet to see any evidence to support the president’s unilateral determinations that these vessels, or the activities of those on board, warrant lethal military force rather than law enforcement-led interdiction,” House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said last month as the campaign of boat strikes crossed the one-year mark.

Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) cited the ongoing campaign of drone strikes in a set of impeachment articles he brought against Hegseth last month. Massie said the campaign of strikes on suspected drug boats replaced regular maritime law enforcement with extrajudicial killings.

Ryan Morgan, Epoch Times