Jonathan P. Baird

Football is returning and like many, I am glad to have it back. As a life-long Philadelphia Eagles fan, I am looking forward to the NFL season and wondering how my team will fare without AJ Brown, the Patriots’ outstanding new acquisition at wide receiver.

For a few years, football has preceded without discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, the neurodegenerative disease affecting football players. That hiatus is over. A new published study found that one quarter of NFL players who died over a recent six year period suffered from CTE. That is a staggering statistic. It likely means that CTE is much more common among NFL players than had previously been thought.

The study conducted by Mass General Brigham, Boston University and the Concussion and CTE Foundation found that the rate of brain disease represented an occupational hazard way beyond that found in other American workplaces. In response to the study, David Michaels, who led the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under President Obama said:

“There are workers who’ve been exposed to high levels of asbestos exposure, which leads to very high rates of lung disease. And, certainly, you know, a lifetime working in coal mines leads to very high risk of black lung disease. But a degenerative neurological disease – I’Ve never seen anything comparable.

The experts say that CTE risk comes from the cumulative effect of hundreds (if not thousands) of hits football players experience over their lifetime of playing the sport. This must be a concern at all levels of football including youth leagues, high school, college and the NFL.

CTE has also been associated with hockey, rugby, and soccer. It was first recognized in the boxing world almost a century ago. Symptoms include cognitive impairment and dementia, depression, headaches, confusion, memory loss, erratic behavior, mood swings, loss of impulse control and uncharacteristic violence. One complication is that CTE can only be diagnosed after death.

While the NFL always says it is committed to maintaining the physical and mental health of players, it has a long history of downplaying the risks associated with repeated head trauma. It is not unlike tobacco or firearms companies where big business generates and manufactures doubt to sidetrack reform efforts. The NFL denied liability when it settled the class action about CTE in 2013. Their acknowledgements have been marginal at best.

The NFL doesn’t want the CTE publicity. Very few CTE cases actually break through and achieve public notice and comment. Junior Seau, Kenny Stabler, Vincent Jackson and Frank Gifford did because they were superstars. There are many players who are relative unknowns in the NFL trenches who have died with CTE complications. These players suffer in obscurity later in their life when they are unknown and completely removed from the public spotlight.

Most active NFL players worry that disclosing concussions will put them out of the game and possibly end their career. There is a disincentive to disclose. Also, and this is very human, players don’t want to think about it because they worry they probably have or will have the disease.

The NFL has taken some positive steps like improving football helmets. Players, with a few exceptions, are now mandated to wear padded covers over their helmets known as Guardian caps during contact practices unless they have specific helmet models deemed high performance, Limiting full-contact practices is another important protocol all football teams could do. Reducing the number of head impacts could definitely help reduce CTE. Shortening the season deserves consideration as well although the league has been moving in the opposite direction.

It remains unknown why some players get the condition and others don’t. Researchers hope to do a follow-up study to the one just released that will estimate the overall rate of CTE in all NFL players at the time of their death.

The 2001 New England Patriots, a team that won the Super Bowl, has had seven former players die who were between the ages of 35 and 50 according to the Boston Globe. At least three were diagnosed with CTE.

The reality of the harm of football has not sunk in with the American public and I say that as a fan. The toll the sport is taking on players is devastating. If you think of any other workplace, would people put up with a quarter of workers dying from their job? And it is possible the numbers might be much higher. We have only learned about CTE because some players have donated their brains to be studied after their death. Much more scientific information needs to be gathered, Hopefully scientists will be able to figure out a way to diagnose CTE before death.

I think the question needs to be raised: should football continue as it is currently played? Is the cost too high? Should football be reimagined in a flag football version or some other safer incarnation?

No doubt this idea would absolutely be met with howls of protest. So many love the sport but parents particularly need to think hard about whether they want their kid taking this risk. Injuries go along with the game but brain injuries place football in a different and more dangerous category, You can replace other body parts, the brain not so much.

It is not that people want injuries but Americans seem more than willing to accept the injuries for the sake of distraction and entertainment. It is someone else’s son being harmed and the harm is not a certainty. I am not seeing a reckoning about CTE any time soon. It might take some more horrific shocks to awaken our collective conscience.

For all who observe the U.S. Supreme Court, this last term was a sad spectacle. People can debate which decision was the worst. The Louisiana v Callais case that gutted the Voting Rights Act has to rank near the top of the list but I would suggest a different decision. In the case of Mullin v Doe, the Supreme Court gave the Trump regime permission to deport thousands of Haitians and Syrians who were in Temporary Protected Status or TPS.

TPS has existed to prevent people from being deported into dangerous conditions. Under TPS, the Department of Homeland Security provided legal status to citizens of countries that were unsafe due to armed conflict, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions.

The Supreme Court decision contained no analysis of the safety conditions in either Haiti or Syria. The U.S. State Department website specifies that U.S. commercial flights to and from Port-au-Prince are suspended due to instability and violence. It also advises Americans to “not travel to Syria for any reason” because of violence in the country.

When Congress created TPS in 1990 the idea was to ensure that people would not be deported to places where their safety would be in jeopardy. The Court majority could care less. In a shadow docket decision, they already had green-lighted deportation of migrants to third countries where they had no prior ties.

The things that are wrong in Justice Alito’s majority opinion in the TPS case could include a list but I wanted to focus on its worst aspect which is its racism. The plaintiffs only had to show a likelihood that racism was one motivating factor in the decision to terminate TPS. Under their equal protection claim, plaintiffs did not have to show racism was the sole, primary or even dominant cause.

The plaintiffs easily showed that racism was a motivating factor. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan pointed to Donald Trump’s many statements evincing racial animus. Trump called Haiti a “shithole country”. He claimed Haitians in Ohio “were eating the dogs and eating the cats” of Americans. He accused Haitians of “poisoning the blood” of the nation and he said they probably had AIDS. Kristi Noem, his prior Secretary of Homeland Security described Haitians as “leeches”, “entitlement junkies” and “foreign invaders”.

Somehow the Supreme Court majority looked at the stereotyping and saw no racism. The Court majority also misapplied the legal standard for equal protection. Not recognizing racism seems dumb for smart people.

Adolf Hitler had said Jews poisoned Germany’s blood and he described Jews as “the perpetual leech”. I guess this was not racist either. These justices are making racism legal. Justice Alito could not bring himself to include Trump’s many racist statements in his majority opinion. We are supposed to pretend these words were never said.

Racism thrives on silent acquiescence. The Supreme Court majority is giving the government permission to be racist. They are giving their blessing to racism and this is nothing new where the Supreme Court is concerned. Before the Civil War, the Supreme Court acted to protect the right of slaveowners and denied all rights to those enslaved. This was best demonstrated by the Dred Scott decision where the Court ruled black people, either enslaved or free, were not U.S. citizens.

The Court’s record did not improve after the Civil War. In spite of the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Court failed to do anything to advance racial equality for almost 90 years. There are so many cases that could be cited to back up this assertion. In the Civil Rights cases in 1883, the Court stripped the federal government of its power to protect black Americans from private racism, setting the stage for Jim Crow laws. Then in 1896, in Plessy v Ferguson, the Court upheld “separate but equal”.

Unfortunately, Plessy v Ferguson was not an isolated decision. Until Brown v Board of Education in 1954 the Court continuously defended an American apartheid. During all the years when thousands of black people were being lynched in the South, the Supreme Court said nothing. There was only one case in the years between 1877-1950, that the Supreme Court addressed the mob lynching of a black man. That case was the 1906 case of United States v Shipp.

In that case a black man named Ed Johnson in Chattanooga Tennessee was falsely accused and convicted of a rape after a kangaroo court trial. The Supreme Court issued a stay of execution to review his case. A white mob broke into the jail and lynched Johnson on March 19, 1906. The sheriff conspired with the lynch mob. The Supreme Court found the sheriff in contempt. Nine people were ultimately charged and they served sentences of 60 to 90 days in jail. It was the only criminal trial of the Supreme Court in its entire history. Other than that, there was not a peep out of the Court about all the lynchings.

The Warren Court was a brief departure from this racist history when they ruled that separate but equal was not constitutional in public education but that window closed. I would acknowledge there were some very important positive desegregation decisions after Brown.

Since the 1970’s, the Court’s view of equal protection has moved backwards whenever minorities have tried to use the law to challenge discrimination. Witness the death of affirmative action and the entirely cramped understanding of equal protection that has evolved from the Court.

The reality is that the U.S. Supreme Court for almost its entire history has reinforced racism. The TPS decision is largely consistent with the long history where the interests of minorities are subordinated to the white power structure.

What is insidious is the disregard for the lives of the many Haitians and Syrians who have built lives in the U.S. doing valuable and needed work in their communities. The TPS decision leaves their lives in limbo. Many employers have fired people who have been lawfully working in the U.S. for years.

The Court could have done so much better.

I wanted to announce that my ebook Defiance is beautiful is now live and available through the Amazon kindle store. I am planning to do an audio book version and a hardback or paperback version too.

One of the less-publicized aspects of the Trump regime has been its war on science and public health. The Trump mission would appear to be wrecking science. The regime has gutted the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, by ousting all 17 independent scientists and medical experts who comprised the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. Since January 2025, CDC has lost just over a quarter of its federal employee workforce. That is an almost irreplaceable braintrust of knowledge and experience.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, fired the CDC Director Susan Monarez last August after she refused to accept political interference with the agency. RFK Jr., an individual with zero medical credentials, makes decisions based on his subjective feelings – not science.

We witnessed a ridiculous spectacle on August 10 when Trump signed an Executive Order about vaccines. He called for splitting up the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine into three separate single-disease shots. He also instructed the Department of Justice to sue states that fail to provide wide medical and religious exemptions for mandated school vaccinations.

There is no new evidence showing the MMR vaccine doesn’t work. The MMR vaccine has been incredibly effective for decades. One thing that neither Trump nor RFK Jr. mentioned was that there are no separate vaccine shots for each of the three MMR diseases. They don’t exist.

We are currently in the middle of a raging measles outbreak. Back in 2000, the disease had been declared eliminated in the United States. More cases have been recorded this year than in any year since 1991. Nearly 2300 measles cases were reported last year and the total number of measles cases in 2026 has already surpassed that. Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, says:

“This essentially is a public health failure, and it’s avoidable.”

Trump’s Executive Order makes no sense. It can only create confusion as there are no separate MMR vaccines. Separate vaccines are not close to happening as drug companies would have to go through a long process creating and testing vaccines and holding clinical trials.

Too many people are not getting vaccinated with the MMR vaccine which explains the measles outbreak. I think anti-science attitudes are causing and could cause a tremendous loss of life. That happened in the past before the MMR vaccine became widely available.

The anti-vaccine movement has been entirely enmeshed with the far right. Attacking science in the name of health freedom is part of MAGA fascism. Just the idea of many more shots for separate vaccines is almost a guarantee of more sickness. Such a policy would require many more doctor visits, something that would result in less vaccine coverage. Adding appointments and needle sticks translates into missed dosages.

For anyone who watched Trump’s performance around the anti-vaccine Executive Order, you had to note his stating vaccinations were the size of soda bottles. He talked about “vats of vaccines” being pumped into children’s bodies. Doses of childhood vaccines are generally about a tenth of a teaspoon.

Trump also baselessly concluded that rising rates of autism were connected to vaccines. That has been extensively studied and debunked. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Also the U.S. is not an outlier in the number of vaccines given, Vaccines protect children.

What is not appreciated by the health freedom advocates is the critically important role vaccines have played in expanding life expectancy in higher income countries. I saw an infectious disease specialist, Dr. MarkAlain Dery, say that the two most important reasons humans live beyond 40 to 50 to 70 to 90 are vaccines and clean water.

Trump’s Executive Order will likely kill people. Measles is no joke. There is a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis that can happen 7 to 10 years after someone contracts measles. The condition is like a time bomb and causes a drastic neurological decline that is fatal. Getting the MMR vaccine is the best prevention.

I think the reason Trump is talking about vaccines is to distract attention away from his many failures including the war in Iran, his failure to address the economy and the affordability crisis and his continuing effort to hide the Epstein files. With the midterm elections approaching Trump is desperate to change the subject away from these failures. He knows that if there is a blue wave and Democrats sweep, investigations will begin into his bottomless corruption and scandals.

Starting with COVID-19, vaccine refusal became a leading cause of loss of human life. More Americans died from COVD-19 vaccine refusal than died from diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease based on CDC data. Vaccine denialism around measles is a continuation of this pro-death trend.

Publicity about ICE has left out one important component of ICE’s activities. They are targeting for detention and removal immigrant children who entered the United States unaccompanied by a parent. These children were often fleeing persecution, trafficking and abuse. They were trying to achieve safe harbor and asylum here in the U.S.

Since early in 2025, the top immigration official in the Trump regime, Stephen Miller, has made it clear that arresting and deporting immigrant children was the regime’s high priority. He has repeatedly been explicit about that. Yet, the vast majority of unaccompanied minors being removed from the U.S. have no criminal history. They are often trying to escape criminals.

What we are seeing is an effort to dismantle all legal protections for those children. Under the federal court consent decree in the Flores case, children received legal assistance. They also had limits placed on the length of their detention.

The Trump regime is shredding their legal obligations under Flores and is actively fighting to terminate that consent decree. That settlement had established nationwide minimum standards governing the treatment, placement and release of children held for prolonged periods in detention facilities. Flores gave counsel access to detention facilities and it allowed lawyers the ability to monitor conditions in which children were held.

ICE and its sister collaborating agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement or ORR, have been trying to scuttle the right to counsel established by Flores. ORR has refused to pay the lawyers representing 25,000 immigrant children for services already rendered. The government owes these lawyers $65 million. ORR let the contract with lawyer non-profit groups representing minors expire. The lawyers have appealed and the case is now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Trump regime is trying to make legal providers hand over confidential client data in order to get a contract renewal. They wanted to make legal providers submit information that would allow ICE to track down unaccompanied minor children living in the U.S. It puts the lawyers in a compromised situation. They would have to sell out their clients to continue representation.

Imagine trials where the government has a lawyer and toddlers en masse appear without counsel on the other side. That is a scenario the Trump regime loves. There would be no lawyers to report when kids are deported from the U.S. on secret midnight flights. Many of the children being deported are too young to understand what is being done to them.

This scenario happened on Labor Day last year and only the fact that the flight was leaked to lawyers saved the kids from deportation to Guatemala. The lawyers filed an emergency motion and a federal judge stopped the flight The government wanted to swiftly deport 600 unaccompanied children. The government woke the children in the middle of the night, put them in vans and took them to the airport. The judge saved them. The government wants lawyers out of the way as they blocked and impeded their deportation schemes.

Adam Sendukas, a lawyer at the Galveston-Houston Immigration Representation Project has said:

“We know that without a lawyer, unaccompanied children win the right to stay in the U.S. less than 1% of the time.”

The government has done everything to stack the deck in immigration court, including firing over 100 immigration judges. The Trump regime has advertised to hire “deportation judges” in place of immigration judges. The quality of justice immigrant children are receiving is beyond an embarrassment. It is kangaroo court where so-called “judges” give cursory examination to valid asylum claims before ordering deportation for masses of children.

Fast tracking deportation is the plan. Since the start of Trump’s second term, deportations are triple the rate they were during the final years of Trump’s first term. ProPublica says the federal government has been deporting 10,000 immigrant minors a month.

They gave a small Houston-based law firm with ties to Trump $150 million to represent unaccompanied children. The firm has no discernible experience in immigration law or child welfare. The contract covers the 1800 children being held in shelters. It doesn’t cover the 22,000 children who are not in Health and Human Services-connected shelters.

Instead of competent, experienced lawyers, the government is using Trump-friendly lawyers who have never demonstrated any commitment to the interests of immigrant children. Why would anyone give a contract like this to lawyers with no relevant background?

Detention is dangerous for children. Under Flores, children were not supposed to be held for prolonged or indefinite periods in incarceration. Much evidence shows that such detention inflicts toxic stress that damages mental health and long-term well-being. Detention for kids is not supposed to be carceral but ICE and ORR are leaving children alone in jail for months.

The Trump regime is looking to build a new mass deportation facility for kids in Alexandria Louisiana that is located on a toxic waste site which contains high concentrations of PFAS “forever chemicals” in its groundwater.

ICE is paying bounties to local police to track down and find children they can then deport. This is a Faustian bargain. Once kids are found, they are being sent back to the cartels and traffickers they had tried to escape.

The harm toward children that ICE is doing has been under-reported. They are literally destroying the lives of thousands.. Our much vaunted free press has failed to highlight this story. You might think an immigration system would feel some compulsion to protect the most vulnerable and allow viable legal claims an opportunity to be heard. That is not the case in America in 2026. The government agenda is deportation for as many as possible as quickly as possible.