Our official policy is that measles can’t hurt us if we’re all dead

You’re reading Here’s Something, the satirical newsletter critics call “Razor-sharp,” “Pointed,” “Edgy,” and “I’m done describing a knife now—what did you ask me?”

I have a new piece out for

McSweeney's

about the Trump administration’s disgust for any human life that’s not its own. Read below, or give it a click here.

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We’ve heard many complaints about our handling of the largest measles outbreak in the United States since the disease was eradicated. Let us make this perfectly clear: Our official policy on measles is that it can’t hurt us if we’re all already dead.

In support of this policy, we are pursuing every avenue available to us to encourage people to die. Not just from measles, but pretty much anything that’ll do the job. That’s why we’re cutting cancer research funding, shutting down federal advisory groups, ignoring the spread of bird flu, firing FAA workers, and—in an underreported move—leaving banana peels on sidewalks across the country. We want to make life easier on all of us. Once we’re dead, nothing else bad can happen. That’s science, folks.

Many of you have follow-up questions. Questions like “Did you consider trying to prevent preventable illnesses?” and “Did you think about expanding programs that keep us safe?” and “Did you ask even one doctor about any of this?” The answer to all of those questions is: Of course not. We’d be wasting our time. Here’s something you probably didn’t know: Everyone eventually dies. Our official policy is to get that over with, sooner rather than later.

This line of thinking is related to our decision to cut funding for aid around the world. Does our aid make people live forever? No? Everyone’s still bound to their mortal coil? Then what, exactly, are we spending our money on?

Now, let’s get one thing straight. When we say, “Nothing can hurt us if we’re already dead,” the “us” in that statement is not literally inclusive of us. It’s more of a you thing. Does that make sense? Doesn’t matter. Just know what we really mean is “Nothing can hurt you if you’ve already slipped on a randomly placed banana peel and fallen into an open manhole.”

Listen, we made a promise. We’re committed to making America healthy again, and the way we’re going to do that is by removing the one major variable when it comes to health: people. We’re working quickly on larger-scale solutions. For instance, global nuclear war could solve measles in an instant. Nobody has to get vaccinated if nobody’s around to get vaccinated, right?

But we’re also developing less drastic remedies. For instance, we’re encouraging all our top researchers and scientists to leave the country. We’re rolling back every safety regulation we can find. We’re also, as of this writing, doubling our efforts to cover the country’s footpaths in banana peels. That should speed things along.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for medical advice, look elsewhere. We might be in charge of public health funding, programming, and everything in between, but that doesn’t mean we’re qualified to actually do any of that. If you need medical advice, go buy a plane ticket to whichever country your doctor just decided to move to. And if you need a pre-peeled banana, please let us know. We have too many to count.

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The only thing that can prevent measles is my essay collection (when bundled with a set of vaccines). Order This Won’t Help, it’s the cure that ails all ills.

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Here’s where the satire ends. Don’t worry, it’ll be back in the next newsletter. And the one after that. Nothing ever really ends.

What I’ve been reading

While our government attempts to gut essential services like Medicaid and CHIPS, on which nearly 40 million American children rely, they continue to increase our tax spending on the military—subsidizing and providing the weapons that have slaughtered children in Gaza for a year and a half. And while our president turns the world into his personal QVC, Gaza starves.

Below is a hard read (harder still that it’s already two weeks old), but critical to public understanding of the intentional withholding of food and water from starving families and their children.

“The Situation is Now So Beyond Imagination”, Q&A / Isaac Chotiner

“At one point, my colleagues in the north were living on animal food and scrounging what they could find because there was no food left, and children were dying of malnourishment. So then you get these videos where the aid truck finally gets there, and it’s absolutely swamped. People swimming out to sea when the aid drops were landing, or the food was landing from the sky.

Every family we’re talking to—they’re not having three meals a day. Nobody’s having three meals a day. They’re on one meal a day. Some people go a day without eating. A lot of parents are not eating so that their children can eat. And of course, it’s just going to impact everything. It’s going to fall apart, if it hasn’t already.”

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Fascists always turn language on its head in order to quash dissent. An administration that commits daily acts of terror by kidnapping people off the streets and sending them to black sites without due process has instead ascribed terror labels to all manner of freedom of speech, like student expression. Mahmoud Khalil must be freed.

Mahmoud Khalil, Biding Time in Jena by Shayoni Mitra

“No doubt antisemitism is on the rise in the United States and on our campuses, aided in large part by right-wing neo-Nazi ideologues, including the richest man on earth’s ghastly public flirtation with a Nazi salute. But taskforces, congressional hearings, executive orders, and all manner of policy have pinned the blame on campus protesters marching against the world’s most mediatized genocide. These students have been labeled terrorist sympathizers and prima facie antisemites—the result of months’ long, well-coordinated campaign, both within the university and outside it. Relentless harassment, doxing, cyberbullying: since Trump’s inauguration, these strategies have been extended to their logical conclusion—deportation lists and denaturalization lists aggregated by the likes of Canary Mission and Betar.”