The near-miss at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner put a spotlight on a flaw in American government that has been hiding in plain sight. Seven of the top eight senior officials in the presidential line of succession attended that dinner. Had catastrophe struck the president, vice president and House speaker, the next man in line was 92-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, at home in Iowa.

This is a constitutional roulette wheel, not a sensible continuity plan.

The current line of succession comes from the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. After Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman became president, Truman urged Congress to revise the old succession statute. His argument was simple: If both the president and vice president were gone, the next successor should be an elected official rather than a Cabinet officer chosen by the president. Congress agreed, placing the speaker of the House after the vice president, then the Senate president pro tempore, followed by Cabinet secretaries in order of their departments’ creation.

That may have sounded democratic in 1947, but it is dangerous in the sharp partisan divide of 2026.

The modern presidency is not merely an office. It is an administration, a governing coalition, a national-security apparatus and an electoral mandate. If voters choose a president and vice president from one party, a mass-casualty attack should not switch control of the White House if the Speaker is from the opposing party. That would not reassure the country. It would compound the trauma with an abrupt and unelected change in government.

The examples are not hypothetical. If Donald Trump and Mike Pence had died while Nancy Pelosi was speaker, a progressive Democratic speaker could have inherited a Republican presidency. If Bill Clinton and Al Gore had been killed after the 1994 midterms, Newt Gingrich would have stood ahead of every Clinton Cabinet officer. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney faced the same problem after Democrats took the House in 2007, when Pelosi became speaker. Barack Obama and Joe Biden faced it after Republicans won the House in 2010. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris faced it after Republicans retook the House in 2022.

In each case, the succession statute invited the same destabilizing result: a catastrophic attack on one administration could install its political opposition.

The Senate president pro tempore is an even weaker link. The office usually goes to the longest-serving senator in the majority party. Longevity is not a national mandate. Nor is age a succession strategy. If Democrats regain the Senate, the office will likely go to Patty Murray of Washington. Chuck Schumer, also long serving, could also be tapped for that role. Neither are likely to restore calm by taking charge of the executive branch in the hours after a decapitation attack.

Congress should amend the 1947 law by removing the speaker and the Senate president pro tem from the presidential line of succession. After the vice president, succession should pass directly to eligible Cabinet officers, beginning with the secretary of state, then Treasury, Defense, the attorney general and the rest of the Cabinet in statutory order.

That approach has three advantages. First, it keeps executive power inside the administration elected by the country. Second, it reduces the risk of partisan inversion after a national tragedy. Third, it places the presidency in the hands of officials already running executive departments, receiving classified briefings and participating in national-security decision-making.

This is not a partisan reform. It would have protected Democratic administrations from Republican speakers and Republican administrations from Democratic speakers. It would not benefit Donald Trump alone, or any future Democratic president alone. It would benefit the constitutional order.

The United States has become far more polarized than the country that enacted the 1947 law. Pew Research has found that Democrats and Republicans in Congress are farther apart ideologically than at any point in the past half-century. A succession law written for an older political culture should not be allowed to govern a future national catastrophe.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner should not be remembered as a staffing lapse. It should be treated as a warning. The presidency should not be transferable to a rival party by assassination, accident or negligence. Congress should fix the law before the law is tested.

Not merely present. Not quietly publishing on the margins. Thriving.

As of April 2026, Tate’s month-old Substack profile shows more than 1.1 million subscribers and a top spot on the platform’s new-bestseller rankings. In other words, this is not a case of Substack reluctantly tolerating a controversial user in some forgotten corner of the internet. This is a case of Substack visibly rewarding him with prominence.

That matters.

Because Andrew Tate is not controversial in the ordinary sense of the word. He is not simply a dissident thinker, an inconvenient columnist, or a writer with unfashionable politics. He is a man whose “red-pill” ideology is built on misogyny, domination, humiliation, and the monetization of resentment toward women. He has been accused for years of helping normalize a poisonous culture online, especially for young men and boys. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram have banned Tate.

He also continues to face serious legal jeopardy. British prosecutors in May 2025 said that Andrew and his brother, Tristan Tate, would face 21 charges, including rape, human trafficking, actual bodily harm, and controlling prostitution for gain. In Romania, legal proceedings have also continued; on April 6, 2026, a Romanian court lifted the brothers’ remaining judicial-control restrictions while the investigation continued. The Tate brothers deny wrongdoing. In fact, Andrew has suggested Jews are to blame for his legal problems.

That is the backdrop against which Substack has decided not just to host Tate, but to algorithmically showcase him.

And that is where the real controversy begins.

Substack has long tried to distinguish itself from mainstream social media. It sells itself as a calmer, more serious, more writerly place. A premium space. A direct relationship between writer and reader. A refuge from the attention-maximizing sludge that swallowed so much of the rest of the internet. But if Andrew Tate can arrive and, within weeks, rocket into bestseller visibility, then Substack starts to look less like an alternative to the social platforms and more like their delayed imitation.

That is why so many writers are upset.

This is not simply about whether Tate has the technical right to open an account. The harder question is why a platform that claims to value thoughtful writing is comfortable turning him into one of its most visible products. Hosting is one thing. Boosting is another. A company does not become neutral merely by calling its rankings organic. Rankings are editorial decisions made by code, incentives, and design. When a platform puts someone in front of users, it is making a choice.

Some critics have also pointed to the strange mismatch between Tate’s enormous subscriber count and the relatively modest visible engagement on many of his posts, raising questions about how meaningful those numbers really are. I would be careful here: suspicion is not proof. But even without proving any astro-turfing, the larger problem remains. The platform is conferring status, visibility, and legitimacy on a figure whose notoriety is inseparable from the culture he helps spread.

And yes, I know the counterargument.

Substack’s leadership has repeatedly taken an expansive view of free expression, arguing in past controversies that censorship is not the answer and that debate is preferable to suppression. Its current content rules ban, among other things, incitement to violence based on protected class, credible threats, and doxxing or intimidation through private information. That is the framework defenders invoke: if Tate has not crossed one of those specific lines on-platform, then he stays.

But that defense is too thin for the moment.

Platforms are not compelled to promote every legal speaker with equal enthusiasm. Free speech is not the same thing as guaranteed reach. And a company that prides itself on curating a serious intellectual ecosystem cannot dodge responsibility when it turns one of the internet’s best-known misogynists into a bestseller attraction. The question is not whether Tate has the right to speak. The question is whether Substack has the judgment to decide what kind of place it wants to be.

That is why this episode feels bigger than one creator.

It tells writers, especially women, something unnerving about the platform they are helping build. It tells them that the same machinery that can surface an investigative reporter, an essayist, a novelist, or a historian can just as easily elevate a man whose audience has repeatedly been associated with harassment, intimidation, and a coarsening of public discourse. Critics are right to worry that once a platform starts treating that kind of attention as commercially useful, the rest of the culture of the site will follow.

And that brings us to the bluntest possibility of all: money.

Substack takes a cut of subscription revenue. Tate brings a huge audience, a ready-made brand, and a built-in ability to provoke attention. The commercial temptation is obvious. But if Substack wants to be taken seriously as more than a paid version of the outrage economy, it needs to confront the possibility that this is the moment it is showing users exactly what kind of growth it is willing to accept.

Every platform eventually reveals itself.

Not in the slogans. Not in the onboarding copy. In the people it rewards.

Substack can call this a free-speech issue if it wants. Many on the platform will. But for a lot of writers and readers, the issue is simpler than that.

Andrew Tate is not testing whether Substack believes in open debate. Tate is testing whether Substack can still tell the difference between independence and rot.

Today, as the Trump administration makes a historic move by reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, I wanted to resend this piece. Whatever your view of today’s change, it is impossible to understand the current debate without knowing how marijuana ended up in Schedule I in the first place. That history is far less familiar than it should be.

Cannabis is not killing 100,000 American annually, the number of opioid overdose and poisoning victims. So why does the federal government list it along with heroin, LSD and ecstasy, as a Schedule I narcotic, the most dangerous category of the Controlled Substance Act? It ranks ahead of lethal Schedule II drugs such as fentanyl and OxyContin.

Marijuana’s inclusion on Schedule I was not the result of medical studies or clinical testing. It was instead political payback from Richard Nixon, who was miffed that a commission he had appointed to study marijuana, returned with a recommendation to decriminalize the drug. In Pharma, I tell the story of how that happened from an insider’s perspective, the view of Michael Sonnenreich, then a young Department of Justice attorney. In 1969 Sonnenreich had singlehandedly rewritten the federal guidebook to the nation’s drug laws (Handbook of Federal Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Laws).

John Dean, later of Watergate notoriety, was then an associate deputy serving under John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general. Dean had been an associate staff director to LBJ’s National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws. After Sonnenreich had rewritten the drug law handbook, Dean asked him to meet with the attorney general.

What follows is an excerpt from Pharma about how marijuana ended up on the strictest drug schedule in America. An added bonus that it also includes the lobbying efforts of Arthur Sackler (yes, the same Sackler family as OxyContin infamy) for his client, Hoffman La Roche. Sackler wanted to keep Roche’s blockbuster benzos, Valium and Librium, off any of the Controlled Substance Act’s schedules.

Today’s move to Schedule III doesn’t erase the political origins of prohibition, but it does adjust a half-century-old policy rooted more in resentment than evidence.

When Sonnenreich and Mitchell met, he told the attorney general that the “drug laws are archaic” and the enforcement and regulatory framework was a confusing and sometimes contradictory hodgepodge of laws and amendments that had been cobbled together over the decades. In 1951 Congress instituted the first mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions and barred probation for first offenses. Five years later a different Congress increased the minimum jail terms. In 1965, faced with a wave of unknown psychedelic drugs, it criminalized manufacturing or possessing those hallucinogens and gave HEW enforcement responsibility.

None of the laws addressed treatment, Sonnenreich told Mitchell. He believed it was not enough for reforms to curb supply. They should also cut the demand for drugs. Mitchell asked Sonnenreich if he would meet with Nixon.

“Of course, I’d be willing to talk to the president.”

A few days later in the Oval Office, Sonnenreich told Nixon about his idea for a commission to examine existing laws before making any final recommendations. Nixon liked that. Sonnenreich was transferred to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. There, as deputy chief counsel, he began drafting what would become the heart of the Controlled Substances Act. He established “schedules” by which drugs were listed, balancing their medical usefulness, if any, against their potential for abuse.

Sonnenreich was thirty-one years old and liked his work. He expected to spend his career in government service. “My wife and I were happy; we had no problem in wanting more. We did everything we wanted to do.… One day this guy comes in with some Roche people and he says to me that ‘If you schedule Librium or Valium, we’re gonna challenge this, we’re gonna challenge that.’”

It was Arthur Sackler. Sonnenreich had never heard of him.

“I welcome your challenge, it makes my day,” Sonnenreich replied.

Sackler again warned that Roche would battle any effort to restrict the sale of its drugs.

“I’m going to do something better,” said Sonnenreich. “I’m going to file an administrative action to put your drugs under control and put them on the three times prescription rule [a controlled substance limited to a maximum of three refills].”

When Sonnenreich later held that administrative hearing to determine whether Roche’s benzodiazepines should be covered in one of the Controlled Substances Act schedules, he recalls “they had all the big law firms there, the biggest D.C. powerhouses. They were wrong if they thought that might scare me. They didn’t understand I was having a good time. They had just irritated me so much. I was still getting paid the same $7,900 a year, it didn’t make any difference to me.” Sonnenreich and the Justice Department won the administrative action. “Arthur was obviously very, very upset,” he recalls.

Sonnenreich’s draft of the Controlled Substances Act was at the heart of sweeping reorganization legislation—the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act—that the Nixon administration submitted to Congress in early 1970.

In creating four schedules of “controlled substances,” Sonnenreich had in part relied on extensive research and guidelines set out earlier that year by the World Health Organization. The public initially misinterpreted those schedules to think the drugs were listed in order of danger. Sonnenreich had instead balanced the potential for abuse with whether a drug had “any currently accepted medical use.” Although Cicely Saunders was then praising heroin as an effective pain reliever at her London hospice, it was judged to have no medical benefit. There was grim evidence of its abuse between hospital admissions and deaths from overdoses. It, along with LSD and ecstasy, were on Schedule I. So was marijuana, although that was a political compromise. The assistant secretary of health had suggested it be placed there temporarily until Nixon appointed a commission to recommend a final status.

Cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and fentanyl at least had demonstrated medical uses—cocaine in dental surgery as a topical anesthetic—and were listed on Schedule II, although they had a risk of “severe psychological or physical dependence.” Drugs on Schedule III were those with recognized therapeutic benefits but with a moderate risk of “physical or high psychological dependence.” That is where Miltown, along with amphetamines and barbiturates, was put. Schedule IV was designed to include combination drugs that had a “low potential for abuse.”

What was notably missing from the statute sent to Congress was any mention of Librium and Valium. Sonnenreich had expected they would later be added to the same category as Miltown, the industry’s original mild tranquilizer. Roche, however, argued that could not happen while its judicial appeal of the FDA’s effort to regulate more strictly the benzos was still pending. A new round of administrative hearings attempted to settle the matter once and for all. Neil Chayet, the founder of the Law-Medicine Institute at Boston University and a member of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Narcotic Addiction and Drug Abuse Committee, appeared in hearings as “an expert in legal medicine.” He set forth Roche’s position: Valium and Librium were not “drugs of abuse in the usual sense.” Roche even presented eleven letters from police departments that stated that none had seen criminal problems associated with either Valium or Librium.

Roche’s lobbying worked. When Congress passed the law in the fall of 1970 it had a fifth grouping, what some called “the Roche schedule.” It covered drugs with the lowest potential for abuse, and it included Valium, Librium, and a few codeine-cased cough syrups that contained codeine.

As Congress debated the bill, Neil Chayet called Sonnenreich. The two had been Harvard law school classmates. Chayet said he did legal work for Arthur Sackler and suggested the next time Sonnenreich was in New York, Sackler would like to meet him “to discuss Roche’s drugs and federal oversight.”

“Why should I meet with that idiot?” Sonnenreich replied. (“Those are the types of things you say when you’re very young,” Sonnenreich told the author).

Shortly after that conversation, Sonnenreich visited New York. Chayet arranged a dinner at Sackler’s sprawling apartment at United Nations Plaza. The twin thirty-eight-story towers had opened only a couple of years earlier and had been designed by the same architects who did the United Nations. Sonnenreich knew it was home to some of New York’s most prominent families.

“We had dinner,” recalls Sonnenreich, “and during the discussion Arthur got frustrated and started yelling at me. Well, I don’t respond well to being yelled at and I yelled back. Marietta was there and she got up from the table and left the room. Neil sat there quietly. And Arthur and I went on arguing for several hours. I had all the confidence and cockiness of a young guy and I kept telling him he was an ‘old dog who didn’t know the new things that had to be done.’ He was trying hard to persuade me that I was wrong on the regulations. Neither of us convinced the other.”

The next day, when Sonnenreich was back at the Department of Justice, Sackler’s secretary called.

“I got on the phone.”

“You know I like you,” Sackler started. “I would like you one day, if you leave the government, to do some work for me. Think about it.”

“I am going to stay in the government,” Sonnenreich told him. “This is what I’m happy doing, this is where I’m staying.”

Sonnenreich’s career was moving fast. Nixon had embraced Sonnenreich’s idea of a national commission to study and recommend how the government should address marijuana. Going into private practice did not entice him.

The president appointed nine of the thirteen members on the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. They included doctors, academics, psychiatrists, and attorneys. The congressional leadership appointed two U.S. senators, and two congressmen. Former Republican governor of Pennsylvania Raymond Shafer was its chairman (it was mostly referred to later as the Shafer Commission). Nixon tapped Sonnenreich to become the executive director, in charge of a staff of seventy-six.

Nixon expected that the conservative Republican majority with which he had stacked the Shafer Commission would return with an uncompromising finding about the dangers of marijuana. Instead, after eighteen months of testimony from dozens of experts, Sonnenreich and Shafer knew they had reached a conclusion that Nixon was not likely to embrace: they had not found evidence that marijuana was physically addictive, nor was it a gateway drug.

“When I told them at the White House what we were planning to say,” Sonnenreich told the author, “they thought I was crazy. They could not understand that we were going to recommend decriminalization.”

“You need to take marijuana out of the criminal justice system,” Sonnenreich argued in vain. “These young people are not criminals. You are degrading the criminal system. It can’t handle all of them.”

Sonnenreich was not a proponent of the drug but thought criminalizing it was the wrong solution. He pointed out when Nixon had come into office, the government “spent a total of $66.4 million for the entire federal effort in the drug abuse area.” That ballooned to $796.3 million by 1972, and for the next budget it would exceed $1 billion.

The administration hard-liners were furious with the interim report. They feared the public would interpret decriminalization as an endorsement for using marijuana. “From that moment on,” Sonnenreich told the author, “I was cut off from the White House.”

The Shafer Commission did not finish its final report, with 3,700 pages of appendices, until 1973. Nixon ignored its recommendations.1

Excerpt from PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, by Gerald Posner (pp. 254-259). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

This is a somewhat different kind of post for Just the Facts.

Many of you come here for my reporting on current events and investigative stories. Others may have found me through one of my books. But I suspect a fair number of subscribers are not familiar with the full body of my work, much less the role my wife, , has played in every one of those books.

So today I wanted to share something more personal. It is also, I hope, a glimpse into the real world of publishing and long-form investigative nonfiction as I have lived it. I’ll be back soon with the reporting I’m working on now. But in the meantime, I thought it was worth opening a window onto the story behind the books, and behind the name on the cover.

Readers see a single name on a book cover and assume authorship is a solitary act.

It rarely is.

Over the past four decades, I have written 13 books. My name is on the spine of each one, and with that I have gotten the the praise and the criticism. But anyone who knows me well knows those books were never the work of one person.

They were built, line by line, interview by interview, draft by draft, with my wife, Trisha.

The only place that truth consistently appears in print is in the acknowledgments. It’s an odd corner of publishing. Readers often skip it. Publishers sometimes treat it as an afterthought. But for authors, it can be the only place where the real story of a book’s making is told plainly.

Over time, those acknowledgments become something more than a list of thank-yous. They form a record of collaboration, pressure, doubt, endurance, and trust. Looking back across my books, there are literally hundreds of people who were instrumental in telling those stories. But there is only one constant: Trisha’s role in every project I have ever undertaken.

What follows is something I have never done before: a collection of those acknowledgments to her, written over 40 years, across very different subjects, from Josef Mengele to Big Pharma, from the JFK assassination to the Vatican.

They were written at different moments, under different pressures, and in different stages of our lives. But they all point to the same reality: the work was never mine alone. Every book carries a piece of her.

And, fair warning: as with my books, even the shortened version of these acknowledgments is not exactly short.

PHARMA (2020)

Anyone familiar with my work knows that Pharma would not be possible without my wife, the author Trisha Posner. She had completed her own book in 2017, one with a different pharmaceutical theme. The Pharmacist of Auschwitz was the first nonfiction account of the Bayer druggist who ran the dispensary at the largest Nazi death camp. Trisha might have liked a break before going directly from the dark tale of Nazi medicine to the often disturbing history of the American pharmaceutical industry. If that was the case, she never mentioned it. Instead, she once again threw herself enthusiastically into this project, sifting thousands of pages of documents and sharing with me every interview. It was her idea to convert the only blank wall in our home office into a whiteboard. With its dozens of arrows and circles and groupings it looked at times more like the schematic for a complex criminal investigation than the outline for a book about the drug industry. This was, at times, all-consuming. For days on end, we did not leave our apartment but stayed in our “book cave” to meet a seemingly endless series of self-imposed deadlines. When a friend asked once how long we expected to spend on the story of American pharma, Trisha had a ready answer. “It’s a six-year project, but we are doing it in three.” Putting Trisha’s name on the front cover as a coauthor would do her justice. Until she agrees to that one day, this public acknowledgment shall have to suffice in showing that Pharma is as much hers as mine.

GOD’S BANKERS (2015)

It is not an exaggeration to say that my wife, Trisha, is a force of nature responsible for any of my success. She did far more than suffer patiently while I worked on this project. Instead, as an author in her own right, she is my incredibly resourceful partner, accompanying me on trips, sifting through archival files for days on end, and helping in every interview. The best information I uncover is often because Trisha has established a relationship of trust with an important source or somehow manages to ask just the key question at the right moment. Her judgment is unerring. Trisha’s commitment to the truth and her tremendous energy inspire me. When she grew up as a Jewish Londoner, it is unlikely she thought that one day she might marry an American Catholic. And beyond her imagination was that she would spend nearly a decade of her life delving into the wonderful mysteries of the Catholic Church and the Vatican. But to my eternal gratitude, she has done both. I get the credit because my name is on the cover. But I know this book is as much hers as mine.

Although God’s Bankers would not have been possible without the help of everyone listed above, I am ultimately responsible for what was done or left undone. I accept sole responsibility.

MIAMI BABYLON (2009)

Anyone who knows me realizes how lucky I am to have Trisha as my wife and partner. She does every interview with me, some on her own, and sifts through the boxes of often tedious documents and frayed clippings. She is my indomitable collaborator, listening to incessant complaints and self-doubt, and keeping me focused and enthusiastic through the long reporting. She has a knack for knowing what is important and helps prevent me from taking long detours into interesting but unrelated topics. Until she one day allows me to put her name on the front of the book, this thank you is my only way of saying that Miami Babylon is as much hers as it is mine.

SECRETS OF THE KINGDOM (2005)

It is getting more difficult in each book to thank my wife, Trisha, as I am running out of synonyms for “indispensable” and “fantastic.”

She has been my inseparable partner since my first project on Josef Mengele in the early 1980s, but her role with my books has evolved. Initially, Trisha was an indefatigable researcher, her natural inquisitiveness leading to wonderful reporting discoveries.

Then, as she became more confident in her work, she helped me choose book subjects, marshal the voluminous research into cogent outlines, and eventually help with rough chapter drafts and a keen editing eye.

Anyone who knows her marvels at her enthusiasm, and I get the benefit of sharing that tremendous energy with her in our work. Her passion fuels me. I must sound like a broken record when I say she deserves to have her name on the front of the book as much as mine.

Trisha is a published author in her own right, and one day I may convince her to share the book byline as well as the monthly column we do for Ocean Drive. To her I say thanks with all my heart; my gratitude knows no bounds.

WHY AMERICA SLEPT (2003)

Finally, although only my name is on the front of this book, anyone who knows me realizes that anything I do that is worthwhile in life is a result of the amazing relationship I have with my wife, Trisha. An author in her own right, Trisha is a research maven, and I never cease to be amazed by her persistence and the information she covers. But much more than that, she is my muse, not only the person who inspires me, but also the reason for any success I have. She is my eternal partner.

MOTOWN (2002)

Those lucky enough to know my wife, Trisha, understand that it is not hyperbole to say there would be no book without her. She is my indefatigable partner, not only a dream of a spouse but also an author in her own right as well as the collaborator on all my work. Trisha does every interview with me, spends months sifting through documents and libraries and private collections, and helps on everything from the first draft through all the revisions. Maybe one day I shall finally be successful in convincing her that her name belongs on the front cover as much as mine.

KILLING THE DREAM (1998)

And most of all, I pay tribute to my wife, my soul mate, Trisha. Once again, I have incurred a debt to her that I can never repay. Describing her role as researcher, interviewer, webmaster, photocopier, and unofficial editor only partly explains what she does. Trisha also provides unselfish love and nurturing, and her uncanny intuition and commitment to the truth guide me daily. I cannot imagine tackling these projects, all-consuming as they are, without her at my side. Since my name is on the book jacket, I get the credit, but this is very much a team effort, and Killing the Dream is as much hers as mine. I am blessed to have her as my partner.

PEROT (1996)

Finally, I must pay tribute to my wife, Trisha. She works on each of my books, travels with me to conduct the interviews and archival work, organizes the file cabinets of information at home, and scans hundreds of documents into the computer. She listens to my own interminable self-doubts, and then reads every draft of the manuscript, always improving it with her insightful criticisms. She was responsible for first turning my attention to Ross Perot and third-party politics. I am blessed to have her as my partner. This book is as much hers as mine.

CASE CLOSED (1993)

My wife, Trisha, is truly my muse. She is my inspiration at every stage of my work, even enduring my frequent self-doubt when I constantly tormented her with my worries about organizing the masses of information into a solid manuscript by the deadline. She invaluably assists me on each of my projects. Depending on the subject, she endures the daily invasion of figures and trappings from another period. I know she will be happy to no longer live with the shadow of Lee Oswald. There would be no book without her.

HITLER’S CHILDREN (1991)

Finally, last but certainly not least, I pay tribute to my wife, Trisha. As she has in the past, she proved to be my constant and cherished source of motivation. From helping me with the research to reading and criticizing innumerable rough drafts, she lived with this book from its inception. She is my ingenious partner, without whom this book would not be possible.

WARLORDS OF CRIME (1988)

Before thanking them I must first pay tribute to my wife, Trisha, and not merely because she suffered in patience while I toiled on this book. She was my fearless, indomitable, and resourceful partner, accompanying me on most of my journeys, even to countries where the work was uncomfortable and dangerous. Often dealing with faceless, unprincipled, desperate people, who necessarily inhabit the criminal and narcotics underworld, her unerring judgment and commonsense approach proved invaluable in sustaining my own equilibrium and preventing me from falling into the pitfalls that dot the road of such research. At various times she has played the role of researcher, secretary, interviewer, organizer, and unofficial editor. There would be no book without her.

MENGELE (1986)

I was a co-author so there was a joint thank you to our wives: “Finally, and most important, we thank our wives, Trisha Posner and Helena Ware, who have lived with Josef Mengele for five years, and whose support and positive attitudes contributed to and are part of every aspect of this book. It was they who stayed the course, especially during the hectic summer of 1985. It was they who deserve ultimate credit for this record being written.

It gets harder, not easier, to write acknowledgments over time.

Not because there is less to say—but because there are only so many ways to describe something that has remained constant for decades.

Partnership in writing is not just about dividing tasks. It is about shared judgment, curiosity, stamina, and a trust in the moments when a project threatens to come apart.

The acknowledgments capture only a fraction of that. But taken together, over 40 years, they tell a story that the cover never does.

My name may stand alone on the books.

But the work never did.1

Readers come to Just the Facts for many different reasons.

Some of you subscribed because of Pharma. Others because of my reporting on the pediatric gender debate, antisemitism, and the business of journalism and publishing. But many of you are also here because of Case Closed and the continuing arguments over who killed President Kennedy.

So I wanted to pass along a brief note for that part of my readership, and for anyone else who may want to revisit the evidence.

For the next few days, Open Road Media has put the digital editions of Case Closed on sale for $2.99.

This is the updated edition, with my 60th-anniversary afterword reviewing newly released JFK files and assessing the 2023 account by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis.

More than three decades after I first published the book, my view has not changed. The case still points overwhelmingly to Oswald, and the core evidence remains far stronger than the mythology built up around it.

For those who want to revisit the cas…

Read more

I wanted to share a new interview I did with because it gave me the chance to talk about something that has been on my mind for a long time: why straightforward, evidence-based journalism now feels rarer than it should.

Over the years, I have reported on subjects as different as the Kennedy assassination, the opioid epidemic, Vatican finances, and, more recently the medicalization of children under the banner of gender medicine. Different stories, different stakes, different worlds. But the method has always required the same discipline. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. Do not begin with a preferred conclusion. Do not tailor the facts to fit an approved narrative. Do the reporting first, and accept where it takes you.

That ought to be the most ordinary description of journalism imaginable. Instead, it increasingly feels like the standard of a bygone era.

Too much reporting today is shaped before the real work even begins. Some stories are softened while others are narrowed…

Read more

There are mistakes, and then there are mistakes that tell a much larger story.

The New York Times has corrected its embarrassing print headline that described NATO as the North AmericanTreaty Organization rather than the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Ordinarily, a correction would end the matter. News organizations are human enterprises. Errors happen, especially as copy desks are stretched and the pressure to publish quickly is relentless.

But this was not just a stray copyediting error. It deserves more than a shrug and a technical fix.

The problem here is not merely that someone in production failed to catch a glaringly mistaken headline. The problem is that the erroneous headline appears to reflect the underlying conceptual frame of the article itself.

That is what makes this episode so revealing.

The byline was by Steven Erlanger, one of the paper’s most experienced foreign correspondents, a deeply accomplished reporter with decades of coverage across Europe, diplomacy, war, and …

Read more

A year ago today, a conversation I had with Ben Shapiro about the JFK assassination went viral. That did not surprise me nearly as much as the reason it happened. More than six decades after President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the case still exerts a strong gravitational pull on the American imagination. It is not simply that people remain interested. It is that so many still resist the most basic conclusion supported by the overwhelming evidence: Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy.

That should not still be controversial. Yet it is.

I have reported for decades on real and imagined conspiracies. There is an important difference. Real conspiracies leave evidence trails. People meet, talk, plan, and conceal. Eventually one of them slips, financial records surface, witnesses emerge. The lies do not remain perfectly sealed forever. As an attorney, I understand …

Read more

As someone who has followed this trial closely—and as a lawyer—I wanted to share a concise analysis of why I believe the Los Angeles jury’s decision against Meta and Google is groundbreaking.

In reporting last month, I described this case as “the internet on trial.” With today’s verdict, that framing is no longer theoretical.

This is the first time a jury has imposed liability not for content, but for platform design—recommendation systems, autoplay, and other engagement features.

That fundamental shift will have significant implications well beyond this case.

I’ve written a brief breakdown here:

https://substack.com/@posner/note/c-233193489?r=3glpf&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

I’ll continue tracking this closely as it moves through appeals and related cases.

Read more

On this day in 2010, in the middle of the most consequential healthcare debate in a generation, the United States Senate took up a question so jarring it sounds almost fabricated:

Should the federal government pay for erectile dysfunction drugs for convicted sex offenders?

I did not stumble on this as a curiosity hunt. I found it the way many revealing details in Washington surface—buried deep in research. While working through pharmaceutical policy and reimbursement decisions, I encountered references to a little-remembered amendment offered during the Affordable Care Act debate. I went back and followed the Senate proceedings as they unfolded.

What emerged was not just an odd legislative footnote. It was a case study in political dysfunction—and the paralysis that grips Congress.

The amendment, introduced by Senator Tom Coburn, sought to bar federal funds from being used to pay for erectile dysfunction drugs for convict…

Read more

Twelve years ago, there was a moment that now feels like a relic from another era.

The international print edition of The New York Times in Pakistan ran with a conspicuous blank space where a major story should have appeared. The article—detailing how elements within Pakistan had helped Osama bin Laden evade capture—had been removed by local authorities.

The absence was the story.

It was censorship in its most literal form: remove the text, leave the void. A visible act of suppression, that even at the time, felt like something already outdated.

Because the story had not been erased. Anyone with an internet connection could read it. Subscribers already were. The information still moved—freely, globally, and irreversibly.

As a journalist, I thought that moment captured a turning point.

For most of modern history, censorship was about controlling distribution. Governments did not need to persuade—they only needed to block access. Control the printing presses, the broadcast licenses, the physi…

Read more

A terror attack at Old Dominion University this week has revived a familiar and uncomfortable question about terrorism cases in the United States: how someone previously convicted of supporting a foreign terrorist organization can receive a relatively short sentence, serve even less time, and return to the daily life in the United States without difficulty.

Federal prosecutors had asked for more than twenty years in the Old Dominion case. The judge imposed eleven. The defendant ultimately served about eight years before being released in December 2024.

That outcome has prompted outrage in some national security circles. But there is another case, largely forgotten outside terrorism law specialists and a handful of national security reporters, that illustrates how unpredictable the U.S. sentencing system can be—even when …

Read more

Last summer, as the world focused on Israeli and American air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Washington quietly sent a warning to North Korea: any transfer of nuclear technology—or an actual nuclear weapon—to Tehran would be treated as an act of aggression against the United States.

The message was delivered through diplomatic back channels and reinforced through Chinese intermediaries, according to U.S. sources familiar with the discussions. Their account of the warning has not previously been reported.

The warning reflected a concern inside Washington that the June 2025 strikes, while damaging Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, had not eliminated Tehran’s ability—or potential desire—to acquire nuclear weapons.

Inside Iran’s security establishment, the air strikes initially had the opposite effect Washington hoped for. Rather than ending the internal debate over pursuing nuclear weapons, the bombings strengthened the argument of hard-liners that Iran more than ever needed a nuc…

Read more

As the American and Israeli military operation against the Iranian regime unfolds, social media has once again supplied a dramatic explanation for how a Day One precision strike decapitated the senior Iranian leadership.

A viral post on X, viewed more than six million times, claims that over the past several years Mossad agents infiltrated Iran posing as dentists and gastroenterologists. According to the post, these undercover operatives implanted miniature tracking devices into elite Iranian military and political officials during routine procedures — embedding microchips inside dental fillings and during gastrointestinal treatments. When the latest attack begun, the story asserts, those implants revealed the exact location of hundreds of senior officials. That is how those strikes eliminated Ayatollah Khamenei and dozens of the regime’s top leaders.

It is an arresting narrative. The only thing missing is credible evidence.

I have spoken with two intelligence sources familiar with signa…

Read more

This is not the end of the tariff wars. It is the beginning of the next, far more consequential battle.

Today’s Supreme Court decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump invalidated the administration’s sweeping tariff program — but it did not end the legal and financial consequences set to dominate the months and years ahead.

At issue was not merely policy, but constitutional structure. In a 6–3 decision, the Court held that the President lacked statutory authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose broad tariff duties. The majority made clear that the power to levy taxes and duties rests with Congress, not the Executive.

But the Court’s opinion stops at that constitutional threshold.

It does not explain what happens to the roughly $133 billion in tariffs collected last year under that now-invalid regime.

That omission may matter as much — if not more — than the holding itself.

The Money Question the Court Left Unanswered

Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent id…

Read more

On February 12, the European Parliament adopted a resolution by a vote of 340 to 141 calling on EU institutions and member states to guarantee the “full recognition of trans women as women” in all areas of EU policy and law.

A subsequent amendment stating that “only biological women can become pregnant” was defeated, with 233 Members of Parliament voting against it.

That is not a culture war skirmish.

It is a recorded legislative position. In today’s Just the Facts, I examine some of the implications those votes signal for law, medicine, and governance.

The resolution does not amend treaties or compel immediate statutory change. But EU governance does not operate solely through hard law. Parliamentary resolutions shape Commission priorities and influence how equality frameworks are interpreted across member states.

Language adopted at this stage often migrates — from guidance, to funding priorities, to regulatory expectation.

This vote shifts the line between biology and law.

Read more

Editor’s Note:
This essay examines a significant shift now underway in US medicine. Two of the country’s most influential medical organizations have reversed course on pediatric gender surgery, conceding that irreversible interventions on minors are not supported by solid evidence and should generally be delayed until adulthood.

I addressed this development in a New York Post column published yesterday. Here, on Just the Facts, I take another look at why this reversal occurred, what it leaves unresolved, and why institutional accountability can no longer be deferred.
For nearly a decade, U.S. professional medical organizations insisted that pediatric gender surgery rested on a solid scientific foundation and represented established best practice.

Last week, two of the most powerful medical organizations in the United States—the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association—abandoned that position.

They now concede that irreversible gender surgeries on minors ar…

Read more

After nearly a decade of reporting on institutional medical failures, I have learned to recognize the moment when a story quietly turns. That moment arrived this past week. A New York jury delivered the first successful malpractice verdict tied to pediatric gender medicine, a legal development that may prove more consequential than any policy statement or regulatory review.

Over the past nine days, I have been immersed in taping new courses for the Peterson Academy: Journalism 102, The Secrets of Big Pharma, and The Politics of Cancer. It was an intensive stretch and a reminder of why long-form, evidence-based reporting still matters. Now, on my way back to Miami, I want to update Just the Facts subscribers on the legal watershed that crystallized while I was away.

For the first time, a former minor patient who underwent irreversible medical intervention and later sought to reverse those decisions prevailed in court. A jury awarded two million dollars in damages after finding that the m…

Read more