Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

When Addiction Entered the House That OxyContin Built

There are moments in a long-running public scandal when history seems to write the coda itself.Last week, while much of the national press barely noticed, Joss Sackler, wife of former Purdue Pharma board member David Sackler, appeared in federal court in Miami and pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation. She admitted deleting WhatsApp messages that would have shown she was the intended recipient of prescription painkillers seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Miami International Airport in June 2024. Sackler was addicted at the time to the opioids that had helped ignite the deadliest prescription drug crisis in American history while simultaneously creating a multi-billion-dollar empire for the family into which she had married. She is scheduled for sentencing in July and faces a statutory maximum of 20 years, though the guidelines are expected to call for a far lighter sentence.That would be a sad story in almost any family.In this family, it is something more.Her husband, David Sackler, is the son of Richard Sackler, the former Purdue president and chief executive, and he served on Purdue’s board before the company entered bankruptcy.I have written extensively about the Sacklers, Purdue, and OxyContin, including in my book Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, and in follow-up reporting and commentary in the New York Times and here on Just the Facts. I argued then, and I believe now, that the people who directed Purdue deserved at the very least a criminal investigation commensurate with the scale of the lethal catastrophe they had sparked.Instead, Purdue Pharma, the corporate entity, pleaded guilty in 2020 to federal conspiracy and fraud charges related to its business practices. It had pled guilty in 2007 to a felony charge of misbranding OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead. But no member of the Sackler family has ever been criminally charged for Purdue’s conduct.That remains one of the great failures of accountability in modern American public health.The opioid epidemic has killed on a scale that is often forgotten. The Associated Press, using federal data, reported that more than 900,000 deaths in the United States have been connected to opioid overdose since 1999. The early wave was driven by prescription opioids, led by OxyContin, and followed by heroin and then fentanyl.Those numbers are not abstractions. They are parents who never came home. Children found dead in bedrooms. Veterans. Nurses. Construction workers. Teenagers. Grandmothers. People who were prescribed pills after surgery. People who were told their pain could be safely controlled. Patients who trusted doctors, who believed drug labels, who had faith in a system that had already been compromised. I have met and talked to many of the families of the victims. For every person who died from an opioid overdose, there are relatives and friends whose lives have forever been changed.Just the Facts is reader-supported. Become a subscriber.For years, many of those families fought the Sacklers in court, in bankruptcy proceedings, in the press, and in public memory. They demanded something more than money. They wanted admissions and accountability. Many wanted the Sackler name to stop floating above the wreckage, insulated by trusts, lawyers, philanthropy, and the antiseptic language of civil settlements.Instead, what they finally received was a flawed multibillion-dollar bankruptcy deal. On May 1, 2026, a $7.4 billion national Purdue and Sackler settlement became legally effective. It is the messy and unsatisfying conclusion to a decade of litigation over Purdue’s and the Sacklers’ role in fueling the opioid crisis. The Sackler family owners are required to contribute at least $6.5 billion, Purdue is being replaced by Knoa Pharma, the Sacklers are barred from selling opioids in the United States, and more than 30 million documents related to Purdue’s opioid business are to be made public.That is a tiny measure of accountability. But it is not the accountability for which the families fought.It does not bring back the dead nor restore hollowed-out communities. It does not erase the years Purdue spent turning pain into profit. It does not answer the question that has haunted this story from the beginning: how can a company plead guilty to crimes of such consequence while the people who controlled and profited from it avoid criminal charges?That is what makes the Joss Sackler case so grimly arresting.It is not justice in any legal sense for the victims of OxyContin nor a substitute for the prosecutions that never came. It is not a reason to mock a person who says she suffered from addiction. Addiction is not a punchline or a moral failure.But the symbolism is inescapable.The epidemic that Purdue helped unleash did not stop at the gates of privilege. It did not care about the security guards, the private schools, the family offices, the wealth managers, the art collections, the high-end philanthropy, or the careful legal architecture built to preserve Sackler family fortunes. It did not care whether someone was sleeping under a highway overpass or living inside one of America’s most notorious fortunes.It is a vivid reminder that addiction spares no one.One of the reasons the Sacklers became a symbol of the opioid crisis was because they insisted, for so long, that the harms of OxyContin were someone else’s problem. Bad doctors. Needy patients. Criminal diversion. Personal weakness. Misuse and abuse. Anything but the predictable outcome of a business model that pushed a powerful opioid with catastrophic consequences.Now, in a bitter historical turn, the opioid crisis has reached inside the family perimeter.That does not make Joss Sackler responsible for Purdue’s decisions. Her lawyer is right that her case is legally separate from Purdue Pharma and other members of the Sackler family. That distinction matters. She pleaded guilty to her own conduct, not to Purdue’s.But journalism is not only about legal distinctions. It is also about meaning. And the meaning here is unavoidable.The family whose fortune was inseparable from OxyContin now has a member of its inner circle standing in federal court, acknowledging conduct tied to her own opioid addiction. That fact landed with force among the online communities of relatives and friends who lost loved ones to OxyContin and spent years demanding justice. For them, while it was not the justice they had sought, it seemed a kind of karmic reckoning.I understand why.For decades, America treated addiction as something that happened to other people. Purdue initially concentrated much of it Oxycontin marketing in the rural and blue-collar towns through Appalachia. Those were people who could be dismissed from a distance. And Purdue advanced the assumption that respectable medical treatment could not possibly create the kind of addiction associated with street drugs. That a pill prescribed by a doctor, promoted by a major pharmaceutical company, and wrapped in the language of pain relief must be safe enough.That lie helped build a fortune and the wreckage is still with us.The people who wanted criminal accountability for Purdue’s leaders did not get it. But the criminal justice system has now reached a woman who married into that same family, and it is a lesson that the forces unleashed by the family greed did not remain neatly contained. It exposes the fiction that wealth can build a wall high enough to keep consequence out.I hope Joss Sackler has recovered. I mean that sincerely. Addiction is a disease, and recovery should be available to everyone, whether they live in a mansion or a shelter. But I also hope this story is not allowed to disappear as a strange footnote. It belongs in the larger record of the Sackler and Purdue saga because it reveals something essential about addiction and power. The opioid crisis was never only about drugs. It was about who gets believed. Millions of ordinary Americans learned that lesson the hardest way possible.Now, in the family that set the fire, the story has come home.Just the Facts is a reader-supported publication. Become a subscriber. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

Why Our AI Autobiography has Some Publishers Spooked

Nov 3000:07:16Tap to summarize

This week a syndicated newspaper columnist wrote about one of our upcoming book projects, AI: An Autobiography, and treated it as what it is: a bold, strange, funny, unsettling experiment in letting a machine narrate its own life.At the very same time, Lois Whitman, the New York-Miami PR strategist who is leading the push to spotlight project, is hearing something very different in private from editors. Many told her they are wary of publishing a book that lets ChatGPT speak in the first person. They worry that supporting a machine’s autobiography will be seen as turning their backs on human writers and future book deals.In other words: if we let this book exist, are we helping to erase ourselves?We understand the anxiety. Publishing is already under pressure. Many writers are barely hanging on. AI is arriving at exactly the moment when advances are shrinking, newsroom budgets are collapsing, and everyone is being asked to produce more with less. Adding a very visible AI-driven project to that mix feels, to some, like lighting a match in a dry forest.But here is what we want to say as clearly as possible:This book is not the end of writers. It is not the end of publishing. It is a controlled experiment, and the humans are still very much in charge.What this project actually isAI: An Autobiography is, as far as we know, the first full-length narrative in which a large language model tries to tell the story of its own creation, evolution, and possible future. It is part memoir, part tech history, part speculative nonfiction, all in a voice that is neither fully human nor purely mechanical.That voice did not appear out of thin air. We spent many months in a kind of intense conversation with the model: prompting, questioning, pushing, asking it to go deeper or stranger or more personal; then cutting, shaping, and organizing what came back. We are not handing over the keys to the library. We are curators, interviewers, and editors of a nonhuman subject.Think of it less as a robot stealing a book contract and more as an unusually demanding oral history project in which the interviewee happens to be made of code.What AI still cannot doOne of the ironies of the current backlash is that our human afterword in the proposal is very explicit about the limits of AI as an author. The model does not knock on doors, win the trust of sources, sit for days in an archive, or decide to take the personal and professional risks that real investigative work often demands. It does not feel responsibility for getting a story right or guilt when it gets something wrong.Those are human burdens. They remain human.What the model can do, astonishingly well, is talk about patterns: how it was trained, how it sees its own updates, how it interprets our fears and fantasies about it. That is exactly what this project asks of it. We are matching the tool to the task instead of pretending it can do everything.If anything, the book throws a bright spotlight back on human labor. It makes clear how much guidance, framing, editing, and judgment went into the final pages. Without that, what comes out of an AI system is at best raw material and at worst confident nonsense.Why some people are scaredSo why the editorial panic?Partly, it is symbolic. To some writers and agents, publishing an AI autobiography feels like crossing a line: the moment when the industry openly admits that a machine can sit on the same shelf as a human author. Even if this particular project is one-of-a-kind, they fear the precedent.Partly, it is economic. Everyone has seen headlines about AI systems drafting articles, marketing copy, even genre fiction. It is easy to imagine a slippery slope in which human advances shrink while machines quietly churn out midlist books.And partly, it is moral. There is a genuine, legitimate concern about flooding the culture with synthetic text at scale, drowning out fragile human voices.We share some of those worries. That is one reason we wanted to do this book now, in this transitional moment. If we are going to debate what these systems are and what they should be allowed to do, it helps to have at least one artifact on the table where the machine lays out its own version of events, under human supervision, instead of forever being spoken about from the outside.Why writers will surviveEvery major technological shift in writing has produced panic. The printing press, the cheap paperback, the photocopier, the word processor, blogs, social media—each was seen as a potential executioner of serious writing.What happened in every case was messier. Some forms of work disappeared or shrank. New forms were invented. Writers adapted, sometimes reluctantly, and found ways to use the new tools while fighting for the value of their own voices.AI will be no different. There will be ugly parts. There will be exploitation and bad-faith uses that need to be resisted and regulated. But there will also be possibilities: collaborations we have not imagined yet, hybrid forms, strange experiments like this one that help us see both the promise and the danger more clearly.The answer to an uncertain future is not to shut down curiosity. It is to insist that human beings remain at the center of the story.An invitationAI: An Autobiography is not a manifesto for replacing writers with machines. It is a way of asking, in public, what happens when a powerful new system is given the chance to narrate itself, with humans still holding the red pencil.Both of us plan to keep writing deeply human books. We are not handing our careers to an algorithm. We are asking one of the defining technologies of our time to sit for a very long interview, and then we are editing that interview as rigorously as we would any human subject.If that experiment makes some people in publishing nervous, we understand. But I also believe that shutting it down out of fear would be a mistake. Silence never protected anyone from technological change; it only made the transition less thoughtful.We are grateful that you, as subscribers and readers, are willing to think this through with us. Send us your reactions—to the column, to the anxieties it reveals, and to the idea of this book itself.Will a publisher take a chance on it? Maybe. It is on the desks of several major houses. But whatever happens to this one project, the conversation about how humans and machines write together has only just begun — and we intend to stay stubbornly human in it.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

Release the Epstein Files

Nov 1700:02:42Tap to summarize

What matters most at this moment is not the specific contents of the Epstein files, but the political and cultural momentum driving their release. I’ve spent years battling governments and institutions for transparency: the JFK and MLK assassination records, Argentina’s Nazi fugitive documents, the Vatican Bank’s World War II archives. One truth emerges every time: the harder governments fight to keep records sealed, the more the public becomes convinced they contain a smoking gun.We are now watching that same dynamic unfold around the Epstein files. Public traction behind “Release the Epstein Files” has reached a critical mass. The House is on the verge of voting to unseal everything, and the pressure is not going away. If the files ultimately remain hidden—whether blocked in the Senate or vetoed by Trump—it will only deepen public skepticism and turbocharge conspiracy theories about what is being protected.I’ve said this for decades, and it generally falls on deaf ears inside government: the best way to restore credibility is full disclosure—immediately, not eventually. Keeping secrets in the age of weaponized speculation is impossible. Delay only inflames the belief that someone powerful is being protected.Now, will releasing everything magically silence the most feverish corners of the internet? Of course not. If full transparency fails to confirm their narrative, conspiracy theorists will simply shift the goal posts—claiming files were destroyed, or sanitized, or that the “real truth” must be hidden somewhere else. That is the nature of these cycles.But releasing the files will still help. It will drain oxygen from the most extreme theories. It will narrow the space for manipulation. It will allow investigators, reporters, and the public to work with actual documents instead of speculation.Investigative journalists often say that sunlight is a disinfectant. It’s not just a cliché—it’s accurate. Transparency reduces the power of rumor. Secrecy amplifies it.Whoever is advising political leaders to resist the release is giving catastrophic advice. Fight disclosure at your own peril. The longer these files remain sealed, the louder the questions will become—about who is being shielded, and why.It is time—past time—to release all the Epstein files. Let the public see the truth, whatever it is. Secrecy is the accelerant. Sunlight is the remedy. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

"Klansmen in Keffiyehs"

Oct 3100:07:07Tap to summarize

University presidents last week finally said aloud what many Americans suspected: the pro-Palestinian uprisings that swept across campuses after Hamas’s October 7 attack were not spontaneous acts of youthful conscience but were well-coordinated and funded. “It’s more than a social contagion,” said Vanderbilt’s chancellor. “They’re organized networks as well.” Syracuse’s chancellor went further: “I really believe [the demonstrations] were encouraged by Iran. It did not have the involvement of very many, if any, of our own students.”America has a powerful legal weapon—the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871—that the Department of Justice should use to stop the rise of coordinated, foreign-influenced and financed antisemitic hate groups operating under the guise of political activism.American administrations have not hesitated to dust off centuries-old laws when it serves their purpose. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the 1807 Insurrection Act, even an 1873 obscenity law banning the mailing of ‘indecent’ material have all been revived in recent years.Congress enacted the Klan Act in the aftermath of Reconstruction, when white-supremacist militias terrorized freedmen and Black voters while state officials looked away. The law empowered federal prosecutors to target private conspiracies that deprived citizens of their civil rights through violence or intimidation.Over 150 years later, that same legal tool might be more useful than ever. Its central provision—18 U.S.C. § 241—remains one of the most powerful civil-rights tools on the books. President Biden’s Justice Department used it in 2023 to indict Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to subvert the 2020 election. Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged over the death of George Floyd, pleaded guilty in 2021 to violating § 242, another section of the same act that covers abuses of authority “under color of law.”In January, President Trump’s own executive order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” explicitly cited § 241 and encouraged the attorney general to employ it against antisemitic threats. But the DOJ is not using the statute for its full powers when it comes to dealing with online threats. One of the most important aspects of § 241 is that it does not require an overt act to prove a conspiracy. And § 1985(3) of the Klan Act makes it unlawful for “two or more persons” to conspire to deprive any citizen of “equal protection of the laws” or “equal privileges and immunities.”All the KKK statutes require is an agreement to threaten or intimidate someone in their federal rights. It is important that courts allow conspiracies under this law to be proved by circumstantial evidence. That is key when it comes to online coordination with pro-Hamas/anti-Israel demonstrators who plan their actions over the internet. Online threats are not just speech—they can constitute evidence of conspiracy to deprive Jews of their right to education, association, or religious practice. In recent years, the DOJ has used § 241 against online campaigns that intimidated voters and abortion patients as well as white supremacists and violent anti-Black conspiracies. That precedent should be extended to antisemitic intimidation campaigns.When campus groups coordinate online to harass Jewish students, blockade events, or pressure universities to exclude Jews from campus life, they are engaged in a civil-rights conspiracy—no less than the hooded KKK members who once burned crosses to keep Black Americans from voting. A legal brief filed by the Zachor Legal Institute with DOJ earlier this year documented Jewish students at UCLA literally hunted across campus by masked Students for Justice for Palestine activists, some carrying knives. At Cornell, Jewish students received online threats of rape and beheading. At Cooper Union in New York, Jewish students barricaded themselves in a library while mobs pounded on the doors. These are not theoretical concerns—they are the modern equivalent of Klan night-riders, adapted to 21st-century campuses. The Zachor lawyers called them “Klansmen in Keffiyehs.”Another element of the KKK statutes that the DOJ should deploy is § 242. It applies to public officials who abuse their positions “under color of law” to deprive others of their rights. Public university faculty or administrators who advise, fund, or exclude Jewish students from classes while supporting antisemitic groups can be held liable under this provisionWhen mobs physically block Jewish students from entering a classroom or religious or secular event, as documented above, that squarely falls under § 245, which protects the right to attend public education or federally funded programs free of intimidation or violence. The Department of Justice enforcement is critical since Jewish students can’t bring these prosecutions themselves. The KKK statutes were designed for precisely this kind of situation: when mobs, sometimes aided by local officials, conspire to deny a minority group its place in public life. Congress wrote the KKK statutes for federal prosecutors to step in when citizens couldn’t defend themselves. That was true in 1871, and it’s true on campuses today. The KKK statutes once dismantled segregationist terror networks. They can do the same to the Hamas-inspired, foreign-funded agitators targeting Jewish students today.Antisemitism in America is no longer confined to the fringes of the internet or neo-Nazi rallies. It has infiltrated elite universities and corporate boardrooms, often financed by foreign money and legitimized by academic doublespeak. The myth of “consequence-free hate” has taken root.Just this month, Federal Election Commission filings revealed that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign paid more than a thousand dollars to a Washington D.C. nonprofit, the Palestine House of Freedom, whose website celebrates the “liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.” The group partners with a Palestinian university accused of terror ties and vows to “embark on an aggressive educational campaign” targeting U.S. lawmakers and the media.That money trail is a reminder that Hamas’s influence operations aren’t confined to foreign soil. They’re operating in America’s capital, on American campuses, and across American social networks.The question is whether Washington will use the legal weapons it already has. The Ku Klux Klan Act once saved the Union’s promise of equal rights. One hundred and fifty years later, it can do so again—this time for Jewish Americans facing a new generation of hate. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

The IRS Is Imploding

Aug 1600:13:18Tap to summarize

Last week’s headline that President Trump asked Billy Long to resign—making him the seventh IRS commissioner to leave this year—masked a much deeper crisis. The Internal Revenue Service is facing its worst operational breakdown in modern history just as it must implement one of the most sweeping tax code overhauls in a generation. Charged with collecting $5 trillion a year, the agency has endured leadership turmoil, lost a quarter of its workforce, and now confronts budget cuts that could slash enforcement by half.The timing could not be worse.The Trump administration's “One Big Beautiful Bill”—an 800-page behemoth that promised tax simplification—has instead added over 100 new provisions to an already labyrinthine tax code. Some of the provisions include temporary measures, phase-outs, narrowly targeted exemptions, and complex calculations that will challenge even seasoned tax professionals. Yet, the agency responsible for making sense of it all is in disarray.Chaos in the C-SuiteThe leadership bedlam began immediately after President Trump's inauguration when Danny Werfel, a respected career public servant who had successfully navigated the agency through both Republican and Democratic administrations, submitted his resignation. What followed is administrative whiplash.Doug O'Donnell, a 35-year IRS veteran, lasted just 33 days as acting commissioner. His departure was followed by Melanie Krause, whose tenure ended abruptly when she refused to comply with a directive to share taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a move she argued violated taxpayer privacy laws and would destroy public trust in the agency.In April, Elon Musk, leveraged his influence within the administration, and successfully pushed for the appointment of Gary Shapley, a former IRS criminal investigator who had gained prominence as a whistleblower in politically charged investigations. That move reportedly blindsided Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who traditionally oversees IRS appointments. The resulting power struggle created such dysfunction that Shapley resigned after just 48 hours—the shortest tenure of any IRS commissioner in history.“It was amateur hour,” says a senior Treasury official who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “You had Musk making promises he couldn't keep, Bessent in a fury, and meanwhile, no one was actually running the IRS during tax season.”Michael Faulkender attempted to stabilize the situation by serving dual roles as both Deputy Treasury Secretary and acting IRS Commissioner, but the arrangement proved untenable. It appeared that everything at the top post had settled in July when the Senate confirmed former Missouri Congressman Billy Long as Commissioner. The White House surprised almost everyone on August 8 when it confirmed Long had been asked to submit his resignation and that Treasury Secretary Bessent would act as the interim commissioner until a new replacement was named (Long is slated to be named as ambassador to Iceland).Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner — Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The Great Resignation, IRS EditionWhile leadership played musical chairs, rank-and-file employees headed for the exits. The numbers are staggering: 25,000 employees—representing nearly a quarter of the agency's workforce—are expected to leave by September 30. This is not natural attrition; it's an exodus accelerated by a voluntary deferred resignation program and targeted layoffs.The brain drain is particularly acute in critical areas. The Office of Chief Counsel has lost 40% of its senior attorneys. The Large Business and International division, responsible for auditing corporations with assets over $10 million, has seen departures of 60% of its most experienced revenue agents. Criminal Investigations, the arm that pursues tax fraud and money laundering, is operating at 50% capacity.These are not just employees—they're walking encyclopedias of tax law, audit techniques, and institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced by hiring fresh college graduates.The telephone assistance division, often taxpayers' first point of contact with the agency, has been decimated. Over 9,000 customer service representatives have been let go or reassigned. During the 2024 filing season, average wait times exceeded two hours, with only 11% of calls being answered—the worst performance in IRS history. The agency's plan to hire temporary workers for the 2026 filing season is widely seen as inadequate.“The most serious problem facing taxpayers today is the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code,” according to Nina Olson, who served as National Taxpayer Advocate for 18 years. She made that observation in 2006, when the tax code was simple in comparison to today’s version. Insiders acknowledge it will be impossible to train temporary workers on 800 pages of new tax law in a few weeks. They will be overwhelmed, taxpayers will be frustrated, and errors will multiply exponentially.Technology: Running on Digital FumesPerhaps nowhere is the IRS crisis more acute than in its technology infrastructure. The agency still relies on systems dating back to the 1960s, including master files written in COBOL—a programming language so outdated that finding programmers who understand it has become increasingly difficult and expensive.The Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act had allocated $80 billion over 10 years for IRS modernization, with $15 billion specifically earmarked for technology upgrades. Those plans are now in jeopardy. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), established by executive order to oversee federal spending, has frozen all modernization funds pending a “comprehensive strategic review.”“The review is supposed to take six months,” says a senior IRS technology official who requested anonymity. “But we don't have six months. We need to program the new tax law changes now. Every day of delay means more manual processing, more errors, and longer delays for taxpayers.”The technology freeze has halted critical projects, including a new taxpayer portal that would allow real-time status updates on refunds and correspondence; artificial intelligence tools to identify fraudulent returns and suspicious claims; modernization of the Individual Master File, the core system that processes individual tax returns; and enhanced cybersecurity measures to protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks on taxpayer data.“We're asking a Model T to perform like a Tesla,” the technology official adds. “It's not just inefficient—it's dangerous. We're one major system failure away from being unable to process returns at all.”The New Tax Law: Complexity Masquerading as SimplificationThe “One Big Beautiful Bill” promised tax simplification. But it has made the tax code exponentially more complex. That is compounded by the IRS's inability to provide guidance. Typically, major tax legislation is followed by thousands of pages of regulations, revenue rulings, and procedures that explain how the law should be interpreted and applied. With the exodus of experienced attorneys from the Chief Counsel's office, that guidance is unlikely to materialize in time for the 2026 filing season.Budget Cuts: The Final BlowAs if leadership chaos, staff departures, and technological paralysis were not enough, the IRS now faces the prospect of devastating budget cuts. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed reducing the agency's budget from $12.3 billion to $9.5 billion—a 23% cut that would be the largest in IRS history.The cuts specifically target enforcement, with a proposed 48% reduction in funding for audits and collections. This comes at a time when the “tax gap” —the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid—has reached a record $688 billion annually, according to the latest IRS estimates.Instead of saving money, cutting enforcement costs money. The IRS could return about $5 to $7 of increased tax collection for every additional dollar of enforcement funding, Charles Rettig, who served as IRS Commissioner, told Congress in 2021.The practical implications are stark: audit rates for millionaires will fall below 1%, down from 8% a decade ago; corporate audits would essentially cease for all but the largest multinational corporations; criminal prosecutions for tax evasion would decline by an estimated 75%; identity theft and refund fraud investigations would be dramatically curtailed (there are 387,000 unresolved cases of identity theft as of June 2025, with an average resolution time of 20 months).“Underfunding the IRS is like underfunding your accounts receivable department,” Mark Mazur, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, warned Congress in 2017. “No rational business would do that.”The Hidden Costs of CollapseThe immediate effects of the IRS crisis are already visible: longer wait times, delayed refunds, and reduced enforcement. But tax experts warn that the long-term consequences could fundamentally alter America's tax system.“Tax evasion is widespread, always has been, and probably always will be,” said Joel Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michi...

Transcribe →

Your Perfect Child, By Design

Jul 500:05:15Tap to summarize

In 1933, the Third Reich passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases—a chilling attempt to control who was allowed to be born, rooted in pseudo-scientific notions of “racial purity” and Aryan superiority. Nazi medical schools taught students to worship genetic “perfection,” and had the tools of today’s genetic science existed then, it’s not hard to imagine how ruthlessly they would have deployed them. The Third Reich’s obsession with genetic purity laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. The specter of eugenics haunts every new advance in reproductive technology, and today, that ghost is stirring again.Last week, a coalition of leading scientific organizations—including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy—called for a 10-year global moratorium on human genetic editing. Their message is clear: the science is moving faster than our understanding of its risks, and the ethical questions it raises are more urgent than ever.The immediate spark for this renewed debate is a new software platform from Nucleus Genomics, a company founded by 25-year-old Kian Sadeghi, and backed by tech luminaries like Peter Thiel and Alexis Ohanian. What they have created sounds like the premise of a near-future sci-fi thriller: prospective parents, sitting with a dashboard of up to 20 potential embryos, ranking them based on over 900 traits. These include medical risks—like Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, schizophrenia—but also non-medical characteristics such as eye color, predicted height, BMI, and yes, even markers associated with IQ.They aren’t just choosing health—they’re choosing a child’s future identity.Nucleus calls it “genetic optimization.” Critics call it something else: consumer driven eugenics.What sets this apart from the preimplantation genetic screening already used to avoid serious heritable diseases is the scale, ambition, and philosophical shift: from preventing harm to engineering superiority. Newsweek reports that early users are sorting embryos based on polygenic scores for intelligence and mental illness—sliding ever closer to a world in which undesired traits are quietly discarded before birth by those able to afford the technology.Even the voluntary pursuit of perfection, especially when fueled by inequality and tech utopianism, raises serious ethical questions. Who decides what traits are “desirable”? And who besides those capable of paying for it get access to this technology?Dr. Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU, has been warning for decades about what happens when genetic knowledge meets market forces and parental ambition. In recent comments, he emphasized that genes aren’t destiny. Even identical twins with the same DNA often live radically different lives based on upbringing, environment, or sheer chance.And there are societal consequences of letting wealthy, well-informed parents create genetically curated offspring while poorer families are left behind. One tech investor’s “optimized child” could be another parent’s “genetic underclass.” We risk creating a society where privilege is literally written into our DNA—a new kind of hereditary elite.Some in the longevity movement—where Sadeghi and his investors have ideological roots—frame this as empowering. They see a world where humans engineer themselves out of disease, decline, even death. But that vision requires a brutal calculus: decide who gets born, and who doesn’t.As Liz Wolfe at Reason wrote, “This isn’t about Baby Mozart anymore. It’s about a world where parental choice intersects with Silicon Valley hubris and deeply personal ethics.”Some ethicists fear a coming homogeneity—a world where parents converge around the same desirable traits, slowly narrowing the spectrum of human diversity. NYU’s Caplan said this could undermine human resilience at the species level. And the “solution” from some defenders is both chilling and telling: store vast numbers of frozen embryos with diverse traits, in case we need them later.That’s not empowerment. That’s speculative breeding.What’s most unsettling is the regulatory void. Despite the profound moral, social, and biological stakes, the U.S. has no coherent policy or laws on polygenic screening or embryo optimization. As with many types of technology, including AI, the advances come at breakneck speed, faster than society’s ability to regulate and to institute safety guidelines.That leaves the terrain wide open for ambitious startups and their investors to set the rules themselves.Dr. Bruce Levine, a professor of cancer gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been blunt: “Germline editing has very serious safety concerns that could have irreversible consequences. We simply lack the tools to make it safe now and for at least the next 10 years.”So, is this science fiction? Or is it our future?The more urgent question might be this: Whose future is it?Because once you start choosing which embryos get born based on traits, the line between medicine and ideology vanishes. And history has already shown us how dangerous that can be.Thanks for reading Just the Facts with Gerald Posner. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

America: Big Pharma’s ATM

Jun 1900:02:05Tap to summarize

The United States is home to just 5% of the world’s population—but we generate 75% of global pharmaceutical profits.That imbalance was at the heart of my Oxford Union debate last week.Now, there's a fresh example of how drug companies wring outsized returns from the U.S. market.Gilead Sciences, a California biotech giant, is best known for Truvada, its HIV prevention drug (PrEP), which brought in more than $30 billion.But here’s what most people don’t know:The research and testing behind Truvada were paid for by the CDC, NIH, and the Gates Foundation. Gilead’s sole contribution? Supplying the pills for clinical trials.When the U.S. government patented Truvada in 2015—aiming to distribute it affordably worldwide—Gilead sued to block it. The courts sided with Gilead.Truvada costs $6 a month to manufacture. Gilead sold it for $1,600 to $2,000 a month—a 25,000% markup.Now that the patent has expired and generic Truvada is available for as little as $40 a year, Gilead needs a new cash cow.Enter lenacapavir, a long-acting injectable version of PrEP. Just two shots a year, instead of a daily pill.Before the FDA, Gilead argued that “some people face significant barriers to taking a daily pill,” and that its injectable offers “a more convenient alternative.” It cited data showing Truvada was only 26% effective in certain groups, largely due to skipped doses.This is a classic pharma strategy: take an old drug, tweak the delivery method, and get a fresh 20-year patent. It’s called “evergreening,” and it’s wildly lucrative.The price of Gilead’s new injectable? $28,000 a year per patient.Gilead expects to rake in over $50 billion from the drug while it’s under patent.Ka-ching. 💰💲Welcome to the world of Big Pharma.P.S. My Oxford Union debate on profits and healthcare will be online soon. When it is, Just the Facts subscribers will be the first to get it. Stay tuned. Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

Trust No One

Mar 13, 202500:13:01Tap to summarize

My take on the enduring seductive power of conspiracies Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

"Trust No One"

Mar 13, 202500:13:01Tap to summarize

Many people think I am a conspiracy debunker since I concluded in Case Closed, my 1993 reexamination of the JFK assassination, that Oswald alone had killed the president.Not quite.Not all conspiracy theories are equal. Although they have been around for millennia, just in my lifetime I have witnessed the unraveling of consequential conspiracies that exposed government lies about Vietnam, the power grab of Watergate, the Iran Contra arms scandal, and the deceits that led to the Iraq war. Government officials are not the only ones who scheme against the common good. The business world is littered with plots that have enriched executives at public expense. Big Tobacco, for instance, denied for decades that cigarettes caused cancer while simultaneously funding studies to obfuscate the lethal truth under a deluge of disinformation.The handful of real conspiracies, however, pales in insignificance to the flood of theories in a world exponentially enamored with the idea that the simple explanations merely hide far more byzantine and nefarious truths. That the world is run by secret societies is one of the oldest and most persistent beliefs, although those thought to be in charge has changed over time from the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Jews, to today’s globalist elites (the ‘global elites’ overlaps sometimes with ‘the Jews are to blame’.) One in four Americans believe there are dark plots “behind many things in the world.”As a U.C. Berkeley Political Science major, I am a natural skeptic. I don’t put a lot of faith in institutions. Even when the government tries to do something good, it often does so inefficiently. It cannot build a homeless shelter or a freeway extension on budget or on time. When it conspires to lie and work against the public interest, the truth might be slow to emerge, but it always does. Leaked files, whistleblowers, hacked email accounts, credible bits of evidence of what was supposed to stay secret, find their way into the public domain. Massive document dumps like the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, the Panama Files, and the Snowden leaks, highlight a lot of government and corporate wrongdoing. But there is not a single mention in those millions of documents about hiding space aliens, faking the moon landing, killing JFK, blowing up the World Trade Center, or stealing a presidential election.Researchers who study the psychology of conspiracy theories conclude that their spiraling popularity is the result of record levels of anxiety in contemporary society, coupled with widespread disenfranchisement and alienation. Conspiracy theories make a chaotic world seem more ordered and controllable. Ideas that years ago might have been the province of the tin foil hat fringe today make their way into the digital zeitgeist at warp speed. As innuendos, rumors, fake information, and a dose of AI, go viral, what used to percolate for years now takes only hours to gain momentum.That is especially true when it comes to history changing and unexpected events. Proportionality bias is the inclination to believe that big events must have big causes. People have no problem understanding that tens of thousands die annually in car wrecks. But when that person was Princess Diana in 1997, there was instant speculation about foul play. Instead of AIDS being a centuries-long natural evolution of a retrovirus from Africa it must have been the CIA deploying a bioweapon designed to kill inner city Blacks and gay men. No way that nineteen hijackers armed with box cutters pulled off 9/11. COVID could not have naturally jumped species from animals to humans in a wet market in China. It must have been a laboratory creation designed by governments and billionaires as a beta test run for controlling the population while censoring dissent under the guise of public health.Historian William Manchester wrote about proportionality psychology as it related to the JFK assassination:“If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime . . . you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals."But if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn't balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president's death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”Manchester’s last line highlights one of my basic rules: show me the evidence (it’s not an accident that my Substack is titled Just the Facts). Evidence is often in short supply. A lot of otherwise intelligent people find ways to rationalize their beliefs. They search for something, anything, that confirms their bias. Many suffer from what is called hindsight bias; knowing what happened lets people interpret evidence to fit their theory of how it happened. Trump supporters, for instance, think the Secret Service’s negligence on the day of the attempted Butler assassination was a convenient cover to hide a secret plot to kill the former president. Meanwhile, those who can’t stand Trump, refuse to believe there was a near death shot that only nicked his ear and were convinced the event was staged.Conspiracy theories seem like simple answers to difficult problems because most people do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. For instance, my last book, Pharma, was a history of the American pharmaceutical industry. I uncovered no shortage of drug company conspiracies that put profits ahead of patients. But some readers were disappointed that I did not conclude that vaccines caused autism. Many children diagnosed with autism received childhood vaccines. That is a correlation. But it does not provide the proof that one causes the other. The proof might be there one day, but it is not yet available.The proof cited frequently to support a conspiracy theory turns out to be something totally discredited, as with the falsified data in the medical journal relied on for the autism-vaccine connection, or is something that has been repeated so often it is widely accepted as true. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time someone unequivocally told me that the world’s greatest marksmen tried and failed to pull off the shooting sequence as Oswald did when he killed President Kennedy. The timing and accuracy of Oswald’s shots have been repeatedly reproduced. Still, the misinformation thrives.The absence of proof does not deter some theorists from speculating that the evidence of a conspiracy must exist somewhere, they just don’t know where. One Berkeley English professor invented the “negative template” to explain away a lack of proof. He posited that if someone is expecting to find information in a classified file, and it is not there when the file is released, that alone is “evidence” it was removed or destroyed by the conspirators.Investigative journalists operate with a different standard. A credible lead will sometimes have us hunting for even a shred of evidence. Last year, for instance, I spent a few frustrating months chasing a tip from a retired law enforcement officer about possible foul play in the death of Jeffrey Epstein. That Epstein was murdered to keep a lid on the sordid sexual secrets involving some of the world’s most powerful people is a certifiable conspiracy theory. It is something I thought unlikely but possible. The retired officer had been a reliable source for some of my past reporting. Ultimately, despite dozens of interviews and lots of hunting for documents, every promising avenue of inquiry proved fruitless. While I was left with concerns about what some of the prison staff did on the day Epstein died, I was convinced that he had killed himself. No media outlet was interested in publishing my dog bites a man story; they all wanted man bites a dog.In a rational world, no conspiracy theory, no matter how enticing, would survive without some credible evidence. But that does not matter in an era in which a lot of people get their news from Tik Tok. Chasing meritless conspiracy theories, I am often told, is harmless. That ignores that they sometimes produce dangerous consequences. After reading online in 2016, for instance, about a Washington, D.C.–area pizzeria that harbored young children as sex slaves as part of a Hillary Clinton-run child abuse ring, a 28-year-old father of two drove six hours with his AR-15 to rescue the children. No one was injured when he opened fire inside the restaurant. Not so lucky were the eleven killed and six injured at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. The gunman believed that a migrant caravan on its way to the U.S. was part of a Jewish plot to flo...

Transcribe →

Republicans Can Save Women's Sports

Dec 12, 202400:03:55Tap to summarize

My latest WSJ OpEd went live this evening online and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Here it is in full for Just the Facts subscribers (note: The VoiceOver for this article is an AI automated voice)Protecting women’s sports should be at the top of the Trump administration’s to-do list. The issue gained national attention in 2022, when male swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been ranked 65th among men in the nation for the 500-yard freestyle, won an NCAA swimming championship while competing as a woman. A United Nations report last month revealed that men identifying as women have won 890 medals in 29 female-only sports worldwide.The Education Department in April proposed a regulation adding “gender identity” as a protected category to Title IX rules. Title IX, enacted in 1972, bans sex discrimination by federally funded educational institutions. The new rule, which went into effect Aug. 1, allows males unfettered access to female locker rooms and bathrooms. It also signals approval of men participating in and dominating women’s athletics.Republicans tried unsuccessfully to pre-empt the Title IX changes. In 2023 the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” When it got to the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville—who began his career as a high-school girls’ basketball coach—asked for unanimous consent. Hawaii’s Sen. Mazie Hirono objected, saying it would bar people from playing sports “consistent with their gender.” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stymied the bill. In July Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R., Miss.) and Rep. Mary Miller (R., Ill.), introduced a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse the Biden regulation. It passed the House along party lines, 210-205. Mr. Schumer again made certain it died in the Senate.Federal courts blocked the Biden administration rule in 26 states. The Supreme Court upheld these injunctions and may eventually take up the new rule itself. The new Republican-controlled Congress could settle the matter quickly by passing a bill to reverse the Biden Title IX modifications. It would sail through the House, maybe even winning some support from Democratic representatives who saw the potency of the issue in the November election. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has said that his party is “out of touch” and that he doesn’t want his daughters playing in sports against males.New Senate Majority Leader John Thune could force Democrats to vote on the issue. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans will have 53, and the new Senate will have 10 members from states Donald Trump carried. Should the effort to restore Title IX stall in the Senate, Mr. Trump can issue an executive order barring institutions that receive federal funding from allowing male athletes to participate in athletic programs designed for girls and women. It will get tied up in litigation, but at least the federal government will be on the right side of the issue. The Trump administration should be at the forefront to restore fairness and demonstrate quickly that elections have real consequences for protecting women’s rights.Mr. Posner is author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America.” Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Transcribe →

All episodes

When Addiction Entered the House That OxyContin Built

Why Our AI Autobiography has Some Publishers Spooked

Release the Epstein Files

"Klansmen in Keffiyehs"

The IRS Is Imploding

Your Perfect Child, By Design

America: Big Pharma’s ATM

Trust No One

"Trust No One"

Republicans Can Save Women's Sports