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JD Vance admitted that he’s fine with his work in government triggering the biblical apocalypse. ICE deported Cubans who had been living in Florida to the Central African Republic without telling them where they were going. The CDC’s new director excluded two measles deaths from the agency’s national tracker after RFK Jr. publicly questioned whether they were real. And a federal judge caught RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services citing fake, AI-generated studies to justify cutting teen pregnancy prevention programs.
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Finally, a politician honest enough to reveal his five-year plan.
Vice President JD Vance sat down for an hourlong interview with Bryce Crawford, a 22-year-old evangelist podcaster, and told him that he would be comfortable if his work in government ushered in the end of the world. Vance said he is focused on doing what he called God’s work, and that if it leads to the end times, that is acceptable to him.
He also told Crawford that he would not be surprised if the Antichrist were already walking among us. He did not say who he thought the Antichrist might be, though most people assume it to be his boss.
The Christian end times, also known as “the Rapture,” refer to a period of widespread war and catastrophic suffering. It includes a final divine judgment of all humanity, where all true believers are taken to heaven while the rest of us sinners stay on Earth to suffer. It also supposedly begins with all Jewish people returning to Israel, in case you were wondering why so many Christians are obsessed with that particular patch of land.
The Rapture is an Evangelical myth, making it strange that Vance would believe in it as a supposed Catholic. Then again, he does spend a lot of time around people who think the Book of Revelation is a policy roadmap.
Yasmany Moreno, a 32-year-old Cuban who ran a small trucking company in South Florida, had spent more than a year bouncing between immigration detention centers across the country. On July 30, officers put him on a plane in Texas. Nobody told him where he was going until five hours into the flight, when an immigration officer informed him the destination was Africa.
Moreno said he thought it was a joke because the officer was laughing. But he landed in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, and a country the U.S. State Department has issued a Level 4 travel advisory against. The government warns Americans not to visit for any reason because of terrorism, kidnapping, and landmines.
Moreno came to the United States as a refugee on a raft in 2016 and was allowed to stay under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. He applied for a green card but was denied because his temporary permit expired.
He is now in a guarded building in Bangui where he does not speak the language, cannot leave without paying a guard five dollars to escort him, and has no path to asylum or any other legal process.
Amnesty International says the Trump administration has sent more than 100 people to African countries under similar agreements in the past year. The deportees have no case for asylum and no way to go back to their home countries.
The nation’s top health official saw a dead baby and asked for a recount.
Pennsylvania Department of Health officials announced two measles-related deaths in Lancaster County on August 25, the first measles deaths in the state in 35 years. One of the dead was a newborn. Just a day later, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly questioned whether the deaths were real.
Then the new CDC director Erica Schwartz took the unusual step of removing the deaths from the agency’s weekly national count. There is no information available to determine whether measles was the cause or a contributing factor in the deaths, the CDC said in a statement. An August 28 data update was also delayed.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro claimed that during a call with Kennedy, the health secretary launched into a rant about fetal tissue and blamed the previous administration for the measles outbreak. Kennedy reportedly told Shapiro it would be better if the country went back to what he called natural measles.
In Pennsylvania, there have been 460 official cases of measles reported in 2026, but doctors there believe the real number could be as high as 2,000 because so many cases are never reported in rural Amish and Mennonite communities. And just for the record, measles typically peaks in the winter. The current count is from August.
Oh good, more RFK Jr.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued a preliminary injunction against the HHS on Monday after finding that the agency cited studies that don’t exist. He wrote in the opinion that the studies instead appear to be AI-generated.
The order halts a policy that has resulted in millions of dollars in grant cuts for organizations providing comprehensive sex education programs nationwide. Cooper noted that while abstinence-only education may be appropriate for some communities, HHS offered no justification for applying it across the board.
This is not the first time HHS has been caught using AI-generated material. Last year, the department’s Make America Healthy Again report also contained references to studies that did not exist along with multiple citation errors.
Somewhere, a college student just got expelled for doing exactly what a Cabinet secretary did twice.
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House GOP Majority Shrinks as Two Democrats Are Sworn In. Everton Blair, a former school board chairman who won a special election to replace the late Georgia Rep. David Scott, was sworn into the House Tuesday. Speaker Mike Johnson can afford to lose only two votes on any party-line measure, with the chamber now at 218 Republicans to 213 Democrats and one independent. Later this week, Democrat Aisha Wahab will be sworn in to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, shrinking the margin even further. House Republicans returned from their August recess to a government funding deadline and rising midterm anxiety and now have to do it all with an even slimmer majority.
House Votes 413-2 to Censure Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards Over Sexual Harassment. The Republican-controlled House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to censure North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards after a bipartisan House Ethics Committee investigation found “substantial evidence” that he had engaged in persistent inappropriate conduct toward two young female staffers. The investigation found Edwards showered the women with designer purses, tearfully recited poetry to one of them, and gave each a personalized handgun. The committee issued its findings last month and Edwards withdrew his re-election bid. Only Edwards and Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina voted against the censure.
Abortion Rights Group Launches $250,000 Campaign Against Susan Collins. Reproductive Freedom for All is sending out mailers to over 100,000 Maine households reminding voters that Sen. Susan Collins voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who later helped overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s the first time since the demise of Roe that Collins is standing before Maine voters, and she told reporters this summer she does not regret the vote. Collins has long identified as pro-choice, but the head of Reproductive Freedom for All put it bluntly: it doesn’t matter what Collins calls herself when her voting record tells a different story.
** New Mexico Is Beating Dirty Electricity While Keeping Bills Low.** Public Service Company of New Mexico, New Mexico’s largest utility, delivered 80 percent carbon-free electricity in 2025, after making big investments in solar, batteries and wind in the past five years. It runs on solar power during the day. Batteries and wind take over in the evening. The transition has come without the price spikes many clean energy foes have predicted. New Mexico has some of the lowest household electricity bills in the country. Residential electricity costs $0.14 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the national average of $0.18.