Opinion
By Jeff Childers
8/8/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! In today’s roundup: New York Times’ pet pandemic economist races to defend indefensible seed oils to smear RFK in an oily cloud of skepticism; Tale of Two Headlines as Times races to smear Trump over DC crime rates while burying the real lede; and California Democrats try to sneak through the worst bill they ever dreamed up in their guided Peyote bad trips.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Yay! Another sickening problem was solved yesterday in the Times’s editorial pages. The piece was penned by pandemic-loving “Dr.” Emily Oster, Brown professor of Economics (not medicine), and originally hilariously titled, Seed Oils Are Fine, Really. While I was working up the piece this morning, the Times stealth-edited the headline and slightly backed off. It now reads, “Stop Freaking Out About Seed Oils.”
The New York Times wheeled out economist Emily Oster to inform America that, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might technically be right about chronic disease and our broken food system, he is definitely totally wrong in blaming seed oils. Oster claimed the science pinning obesity and other health problems on omega-6 oils like canola, safflower, and sunflower is “flawed” — just another case of correlation, not causation. (Even more guffaw-producing, she admitted that “better data” might later prove RFK Jr. was right.) The real villain, Emily insisted, isn’t the oil, it’s the deep-fried Oreo it slid in on.
Dr. Oster is obviously a greasy science denier.
During the pandemic, Dr. Oster was a slippery chatty Kathy, forging an op-ed reputation for constantly advising parents and policymakers to trust “emerging data” even when it was messy, incomplete, and based on observational studies. She framed doing so as a moral imperative — we can’t wait for perfect data, kids are suffering now. Now, though, she dismisses the vast body of emerging and observational evidence against seed oils because, in her view as a professor of economics, it’s “flawed” and “can’t prove causation.”
Never mind that pesky precautionary principle!
Oster became a media darling during the pandemic, applying data analysis models and her economics-based risk-tradeoff framework to covid narratives, rather than conducting any actual biomedical research of her own. As it turned out, she was wrong about everything.
🔥 Seed oils are exactly what they sound like — oils squeezed from the tiny seeds of plants like soybeans, corn, canola, cottonseed, and sunflowers. That all sounds very natural and healthy. I mean, aren’t sunflowers good for you (the jury’s still out on cotton and whatever canola plant is). But, as always these days, there’s a snag in the oil.
The snag is, seeds don’t easily surrender their oil. They greedily prefer to keep it for themselves. So extracting the oils requires an all-out industrial assault: high-pressure mechanical rollers, solvent baths in hexane, repeated heating, chemical refining to strip out unpleasant odors and revolting colors, and finally “deodorizing” to make the end product palatable. By the time the bottle hits the supermarket shelf, it’s been through more processing steps than a gas-station chicken nugget and looks more like industrial waste than anything found in nature.
That’s why critics call them “factory foods.” They’re not pressed like olive oil or churned like butter, they’re manufactured, the byproducts of an industrial chemistry set built to turn valueless agricultural waste into profitable, shelf-stable cooking fat.
Emerging science —the same kind of imperfect-but-actionable evidence Dr. Oster once cheerleaded— has been painting a consistently ugly picture of seed oils. High-omega-6 industrial oils like soybean, canola, safflower, and sunflower aren’t just inert cooking mediums; their polyunsaturated fats oxidize easily under heat and in the body, spawning reactive aldehydes that inflame tissues, damage cell membranes, and scramble mitochondrial function. They skew the body’s omega-6 to omega-3 ratio toward a chronic, low-grade inflammatory state, priming the immune system for misfires and front-loading the metabolism for insulin resistance.
Animal models and controlled feeding studies have linked high seed-oil diets to fatty liver, obesity, impaired satiety signaling, and cardiovascular dysfunction— especially when combined with refined carbs and sedentary living. In other words, they’re not the lone assassin of American health, but they’re definitely in the getaway car. (Dr. Oster finds animal models completely useless.)
Oster waved away thousands of seed-oil studies because people who unwittingly consume the greased products often also eat more ultraprocessed food, exercise less, and smoke more— the “co-causes” problem. But that’s exactly how multi-hit disease models work. Inflammation from omega-6 oxidation may not cripple you alone, but when paired with a high-sugar diet, micronutrient deficiencies, poor sleep, or chronic stress, it can multiply the damage from each of those other “hits.”
This isn’t unusual or new. For instance, asbestos exposure was far deadlier for smokers, and high salt does most of its harm to folks with low potassium. By demanding that seed oils prove themselves as a solo killer before taking any action, Oster ignored the well-established reality that most chronic diseases are gang crimes, not lone-wolf attacks.
Oster’s arrogant demand for a million-person, decade-long randomized trial before taking action sounds scientific, but it’s really a suggestion to wait another generation while the damage mounts. If we’d applied that same evidentiary hurdle to tobacco, we’d still be handing out Marlboros in maternity wards.
During the pandemic, Emily delighted liberal medical fetishists with glossy, numerically-driven risk–tradeoff math. She waded into the debates over mask mandates, school closures, mental health costs, and learning loss— always supporting the government’s conclusions and always arguing that you can’t wait around for perfect data. Her language was always clear, always urgent, and always even-handedly accepting of uncertainty— we must assume the imperfect mask studies are right to avoid devastating harms.
Now it’s like she’s not even trying. Her article lacked even a whiff of numbers, of cost-benefit “analyses,” or discussions of the risks and rewards at all. It was just a litany of tired “correlation isn’t causation” critiques— all wielded in the name of humility, but landing as shrill demands that the field (nutrition) is just too messy to act upon. Although emerging seed-oil science is pointing at plausible biological mechanisms and consistent patterns, Emily requires a colossal trial that she approves before entertaining any lifestyle shifts.
Oh, and she says RFK is a fraud. For following the science. The science that this professor of economics finds insufficient. If only we’d known how to play the “those studies lack substance” game during the pandemic.
No thanks, Emily. We see you. You’re an AWFL pandemic fraud and a shill for institutional interests. Now that pharma’s feeding frenzy is over, you’ve shifted to working for big food. Sit down and shut up.
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A tale of two headlines! Our first headline appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. Behold:
Got the narrative? Trump is surging DC law enforcement for no reason. He’s “efforting” to “portray” violent crime. “Data,” the Times sneered, “shows DC crime rates dropping significantly.” Passive voice alert! Data shows! (And of course, dropping crime rates doesn’t mean no crime rates, but whatever.)
Got it? Let’s look at the next one. This gem of a headline quietly ran two weeks ago, not in the Times, but in DC’s local NBC affiliate Channel-4 Washington:
Uh-oh! DC police commander Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May, after both an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, Channel 4 said.
I’ll give you one guess as to which direction they were juicing the crime statistics. Up or down? Ready? Go.
The answer: “The union claims,” Channel 4 explained, “that police supervisors in the department manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year.”
So, they’re deliberately depressing the crime statistics. Did you guess right?
Specifically, “When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,” Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton explained. “So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.”
Whoops! How bad must crime be for the police department to itself engage in a criminal conspiracy to cook the books to “portray” violent crime as “dropping significantly?”
And if the DC police are so corrupt that even the union —usually the last line of defense for bad cops— is blowing the whistle, then you’re in serious quis custodiet ipsos custodes territory. (Portlanders: it’s Latin for, “who watches the watchers?”) When the custodes themselves are begging for a custodian, you know it must be bad.
So. The Times says Trump is overreacting to “dropping” crime rates. But if those “drops” were cooked up in-house by a compromised command staff, then he’s not overreacting — he’s the only one reacting. Juvenal’s pointed question was timely when he scribbled it two thousand years ago on his Macbook Plume and remains current.
Nowadays in D.C., apparently, Donald J. Trump is the only one watching the watchers. It’s certainly not the New York Times, which didn’t even mention the arrest or the union’s accusations. What a horrible newspaper.
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Oh, California. Don’t make me put you in Portland’s spot. An awful bill —even more awful than usual— is currently sailing through the state assembly and lighting up social media. But I could barely find any corporate media reports about the controversy at all. Local KCRA-3 ran the story under the intentionally mind-numbing headline “Proposed California law AB 495 aims to help immigrant families plan in case of separation.” First hint: the bill isn’t limited to immigrants, at all. The story’s ‘explainer’ was, at best, misleading:
In fact, AB 495 would vastly expand California’s caregiver rules for kids, letting any adult claiming a “mentoring” or extended-family relationship instantly take over key parental powers —like school pickup, enrollment, and medical consent— by signing a self-executing affidavit with no court review, no ID check, and no parental notice, all while shielding schools and providers from legal liability so long as they say they accepted the one-page form in “good faith.”
Without exaggeration, AB 495 would let virtually anyone fill out a “Caregiver’s Authorization Affidavit” in the morning, drive up to a school that afternoon, and legally drive away with the child, without showing ID, with no prior notice to the parent, and no verification of any kind beyond the piece of paper in their hand. Literally all they would need to do is check a box “verifying” they have a “mentoring relationship” (i.e., grooming) with the child.
It wouldn’t even matter that they weren’t on the school’s authorized pickup list, since the custodial powers extend to adding names to the list.
That’s only the beginning. The affidavit signer could take the child straight from the school to a gender surgery or any other medical treatment. If they got pulled over by a cop at 2am in a white panel van with “free candy” painted on the side and a kid in the back, and the cop started asking questions, they could just whip out the self-executed affidavit they signed that morning, and the cop would have no choice but to let them go.
The bill’s supporters do not deny the school ‘loophole’ exists. To them, that is a feature, not a loophole. Their explanation —get this— is that it’s Trump’s fault. In short, if an illegal alien is seized and deported in the morning, who will pick up their child from school? In other words, this bill is necessary because of aggressive immigration enforcement.
Sorry, parents. Your concerns must yield to the concerns of non-citizens.
🔥 Obviously, conservatives and parents’ rights groups have basically gone to war over this abominable bill. One of the most interesting opponents I ran across in my research was terrific Pastor Jack Hibbs, who is calling the bill “sick” and “evil” and even encouraging families to leave California if the bill passes.
🔥 Pastor Jack Hibbs is the founding pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, a Southern California megachurch with a congregation numbering in the tens of thousands and an audience that extends nationwide through livestreams, radio, and social media. Known for blending evangelical preaching with unapologetic political commentary, Hibbs has become a prominent voice in conservative Christian activism.
I am not surprised Pastor Hibbs has waded into this issue, but it marks a sea-change for mainstream religious leaders historically terrified of getting involved in any politics because of their tax-exempt status. Pastor Hibbs is pushing the envelope, daring the IRS to cancel his church’s tax exemption because of his First Amendment political speech.
Obviously, it is unlikely Trump’s IRS or DOJ would act against Hibbs (in June, the IRS clarified that churches can endorse political candidates to their own members). So his courage is even more important— he’s creating a precedent of non-enforcement. Other pastors should follow his example. He shouldn’t be the only California pastor speaking out on social media and opposing AB 495.
California’s Democrat lawmakers could have written a narrowly tailored fix —for example, by authorizing Child and Family Services to immediately step in if a child’s parents are suddenly deported— but they didn’t. Instead, they built AB 495 as a wide-open, self-executing custody transfer scheme that applies to every child, in every situation, with no vetting, no oversight, and no limits on who can claim authority. The result is an unprecedented system that works just as well for predators as for the immigrant families it’s supposedly designed to protect.
It almost seems like Democrats are trying to punish parents for Trump’s immigration crackdown.
This bill is another political rake for Democrats to step on. The “school pickup loophole” isn’t a hypothetical —it’s literally one of the bill’s justifications— so Democrats can’t credibly deny it or fix it. Sane Dems are left awkwardly wriggling through explaining why it’s actually good that anyone with a one-page affidavit can override a parent’s pickup list, which is not a conversation you want to have during a competitive midterm race. I suspect that is why corporate media has been so quiet about the controversy this time.
Oleaginous Governor Gavin Newsom isn’t worried. He plans to rig the game by further gerrymandering Republicans “into political oblivion” in the Golden State. He blames Texans.
If AB 495 passes, it will be parent’s worst nightmare, but national Republicans will have a field day politically. Which is why I can’t imagine it passing, but of course, we’re talking about California.
Have a fantastic Friday! Come on back here tomorrow morning, for another delicious serving of intellectually nutritious Coffee & Covid.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
