Federal officials on Monday reaffirmed that iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms still appears to be the source of Cyclospora, the microscopic parasite behind a multi-state surge in explosive diarrhea cases.
The assertion was intended to clear up confusion that began swirling over the weekend around a false positive test from the Food and Drug Administration—which Taylor Farms celebrated, sparking confusion. Still, many details of the outbreak remain murky, largely due to the vague recall information Taylor Farms has publicly provided.
On Friday, the FDA, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced that the FDA's traceback investigations for the outbreak converged on Taylor Farms. Traceback investigations work by tracking backward from sick people and the foods they ate to where those foods came from through the supply chain, down to individual farms or production facilities. When the FDA said their investigation converged on Taylor Farms, the agency means that, over and over again, tracebacks led them to shredded iceberg lettuce grown in Central Mexico and supplied by Taylor Farms—which also goes by Taylor Fresh Foods.
The convergence of tracebacks was the basis for the FDA and CDC publicly identifying Taylor Farms on Friday. It was also the basis for Taylor Farms issuing a sweeping recall the same day for all its iceberg lettuce sourced from Central Mexico between June 29 and July 16.
At the time, the FDA's traceback investigation specifically focused on tracing back shredded iceberg lettuce that people had eaten from Taco Bell locations. Thus, the messaging at the time suggested that the contaminated lettuce may be limited to Taco Bell. A CDC press release Friday warned consumers not to eat lettuce at Taco Bell locations in five states (Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia). It noted that "Shredded iceberg lettuce sold in grocery stores or served in other restaurants is not affected."
Mixed messages
Then things changed over the weekend. First, on Saturday, the FDA announced that a sample of Taylor Farms lettuce tested positive for Cyclospora. The result confirmed the traceback investigation findings—and also potentially extended the list of contaminated products. But, then on Sunday, the FDA deleted the information from its website, explaining that on further review, the result was a false positive.
In a press briefing Monday, FDA officials explained that the test result was from lettuce sampled at the border that was not included in Taylor Farms' recall. Given that new illnesses are still being reported and the tested lettuce was not part of the outbreak recall, the FDA rushed to publicly disclose the information in hopes of preventing more illnesses, the officials said. But, upon further testing, it became clear that the genetic test for the parasite had returned a false result. Officials would not go into detail on what caused the faulty result, but contamination is a common source of false positives.
Meanwhile Taylor Farms seemed to celebrate the rescinded test result over the weekend, sparking confusion.
"Today, FDA apologized to us," Taylor Farms wrote at the start of a statement Sunday.
"Today, we were informed that FDA made a mistake, and this was a false positive. To be clear, at this moment, FDA has not identified a single positive product test result for Cyclospora," the statement read (emphasis theirs).
This response was followed by headlines that suggested the FDA may have blamed Taylor Farms in error. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, reported the FDA "walked back" an earlier detection, to which the FDA directly responded.
"To clarify, this false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for FDA’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms," the agency said on social media.
In the press briefing Monday, FDA officials also flatly denied issuing an apology to Taylor Farms. They further explained that the false result didn't change anything about the situation, and outbreaks involving short-lived produce often lack confirmatory positive tests.
"I also want to be clear that our weekend communications around a false positive test result do not change the basis for FDA's ongoing outbreak investigation or the epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms," Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas emphasized at the outset of the briefing.
Vague recall
Although the testing turned out to be false, additional information over the weekend did seem to expand the scope of the outbreak—at least the publicly visible part of it. The New York Times reported that restaurants and retailers other than Taco Bell were removing iceberg lettuce they received from Taylor Farms. In many cases, the lettuce was sold in large bags for restaurants or service operations, and sometimes blended with romaine.
Walmart removed lettuces sold under its Marketside brand—which were included in the FDA's notices but not in Taylor Farms' recall list. Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, told the Times that it was removing lettuce products it had from Taylor Farms. So did US Foods, another large food distributor. Jack in the Box restaurants also said they were affected by the recall.
The Times noted that Taylor Farms' recall notice is vague—it doesn't list these distributors or retailers affected, only product codes and dates. The FDA said on its website Saturday morning that Taylor Farms "has not publicly provided distribution information or a list of customers who received the product that was voluntarily removed from the market." The FDA later removed that statement, but the recall list remains vague.
Overall, Taylor Farms said it distributed the potentially contaminated lettuce to 27 states. But it's unclear if food distributors delivered the food to additional states. For instance, New York and California have reported cyclosporiasis cases, but are not included in the recall list.
According to the CDC data, at least 34 states have reported cases. The true number of cases is in the thousands, clearly exceeding the country's standard range of between 2,000 and 5,000 in recent years. In Michigan alone, health officials are reporting 6,571 cases and 102 hospitalizations as of July 21.
Traceability
Frustrating the situation is that the FDA does not currently require food producers to provide information on all its customers. A new FDA rule, the Food Traceability Rule, was lined up to bolster traceability record requirements for producers of various foods, including leafy greens. The rule would "allow for faster identification and rapid removal of potentially contaminated food from the market, resulting in fewer foodborne illnesses and/or deaths."
It was set to take effect January 20, 2026, but last year the Trump administration pushed back the compliance deadline by 30 months, to July 20, 2028.
With Taylor Farms now in the spotlight, online scrutiny had raised speculation the company may have played a role in the delay. The Trump administration's decision to delay the rule was announced on March 20, 2025. Matthew Cortland, a lawyer focusing on health and disability policy at the think tank Data for Progress, noticed that on March 26, 2025—just five days after the decision—Taylor Fresh Foods (aka Taylor Farms) donated $1 million to the Trump-backing super PAC MAGA, Inc (PDF, page 42).
Taylor Farms did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a response posted on social media, an account for the Department of Health and Human Services called the speculation "FAKE NEWS," and claimed nothing influences decisions of the administration "except science and the safety of the American people."
Enzo Ferrari is said to have once proclaimed, “Race cars are neither beautiful or ugly. They become beautiful when they win.” Since the 1987-introduced Ferrari F40 was the last car personally approved for production during Enzo’s lifetime, he didn’t have a chance to consider where F40s fall into that philosophy. But the car ended up becoming a racing legend, and that history definitely contributed to the car’s beauty in the eyes of car collectors, because F40s are selling for crazy money. This one, first owned by legendary auto exec Lee Iacocca, is likely to sell for a real estate price, especially given that it has just 320 miles on the odometer and a $60,000 stack of service records.
The F40 was expensive when new at $400,000 (over a million dollars today), and by the early ‘90s, F40s had already reached million-dollar prices. Eventually values dropped back to half a million towards the turn of the millennium, but from the early 2000s on they have steadily gained value to become several-million-dollar cars. When cars, sports cars or supercars, become such expensive investments, they are rarely used for their original intended purpose. As a result, they sit for years, going from one expensive recommissioning to another, between sales and shows. A good example of that is the ex-Lee Iacocca F40 that is going under the hammer soon.
Let me adopt a James Earl Jones / Darth Vader voice for a moment. Ahem.
“Lee Iacocca asked his engineers to build a sports car. Remember, the competition is good. We’ve got to be better.”
There. Wasn’t that convincing? Anyway, that particular sports car, the one with fuel-injected turbo power, the one that was faster than Camaro Z-28, Trans Am, and Toyota Supra, was the Chrysler Laser XE. (It also beat Mustang GT, Mazda RX-7 and Trans Am in the slalom, according to this ad). The Laser XE might have been built according to Iacocca’s wishes, but a few years later, Lido went ahead and ordered himself a Ferrari F40. Remember, the Lamborghini Diablo was introduced during Lambo’s Chrysler era, so perhaps he was simply doing market research. The F40, chassis number 87345, went into production in October 1990 and was finished in December and delivered to Iacocca that same month.
While it is an American market car, 94th out of 213, it was handed over to Iacocca in Modena, Italy instead of any U.S. based Ferrari showroom. The car was initially registered in Italy in 1991 with tourist plates, and as the RM Sotheby’s listing notes, Iacocca likely drove it a bit before the car was shipped to the States. U.S. market F40s like this one have catalytic converters and U.S. specific front details and important equipment such as air conditioning, but no adjustable suspension.
In any case, Iacocca barely drove the Ferrari. It was already listed for sale in November 1992 with a whole 72 miles on the odometer, and part of those might well have been factory test miles. You know a Ferrari needs to be well dialed in if it’s going to be delivered to a carmaker’s boss.
This is when the Ferrari took its first long sleep. It was sold again in 2006 in Las Vegas for over a million dollars, with 218 miles on the clock, and it required a $12,600 service during the summer of 2008 to address issues from storage. The cam-belt was done at a California specialist, and at that time the F40 was noted to not run on all cylinders. Both cylinder banks were “oozing coolant” at the head gaskets, but issues also stemmed from old fuel. The cam-belt service soon included overhauling the fuel pumps and the cooling system as well as the heads.
The specialist doing the work also diagnosed some incorrectly installed vacuum hoses, which contributed to the engine running poorly, meaning someone had been fixing stuff in the engine bay already before.
With the engine overhauled at 218 miles, the Ferrari changed hands in January 2012 through RM Auctions. With 283 miles on the clock then, the car went to a collector who again drove it very rarely. After his passing, the car was simply stored, and as it now heads to RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction, it has 320 miles on the clock.
To be presentable at the Monterey auction, to ensure a top-dollar result, and to again address issues stemming from sitting, the Ferrari has needed another overhaul, this time at Ferrari Newport Beach. The $40,000 service included draining and replacing bad fuel ($525), replacing the battery (parts $370, labor $350), replacing the spark plugs ($595 in parts), replacing the rusted coolant tank ($4426), and performing a major engine service at nearly $21,000, which included $2,673 in parts.
The 2010 vintage tires were also replaced, with 245/40ZR17 Pirelli P Zeros front and 335/35ZR17 rear – that’s $2,637 in total. The headlamp switch had also cracked, necessitating a $4200 repair.
At any rate, those 320 miles have been expensive. But naturally you cannot compare upkeep of this car to any other car, except for other rare supercars that are hauled from one display to another. This car will never completely wear down the P-Zeros. It will never be driven at breakneck speed. It’s not the sort of race car that Enzo referred to. It’s a classic ‘80s Ferrari supercar, bought to accumulate value, and any service it receives is done to ensure that it pays out the best. It operates on a different plane compared to most cars – when it even gets to run.
Will the Iacocca F40 break five million dollars at Monterey? It’s likely to do so, as low-mileage F40s have touched four million recently (such as Alain Prost’s old, signed car), and RM Sotheby’s auctioned a 1992 F40 for $5,230,000 at ModaMiami in February.
Do you think the 320-mile odometer reading will contribute more or less than the Lee Iacocca connection to this F40’s eventual hammer price? He wasn’t just any auto exec, after all, having been involved with the iconic Ford Mustang, the original Chrysler minivan, the Chrysler-savior that was the K-Car, the Diablo, as well as Chrysler’s own halo supercar, the Viper.
Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager for U.S. President Donald Trump, on November 4, 2019 in Lexington, Kentucky. Photo by Bryan Woolston/Getty Images.
Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.
The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.
Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.
And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.
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When Drop Site asked Perplexity “Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?” the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: “Yes.” The top source listed was Allyvia.org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites.
Screenshot from Perplexity.
Allyvia is one of 10 different websites created by Clock Tower X, a boutique digital influence company owned by Parscale. Each website is dedicated to promoting a different Israeli narrative. FactSignal.org, for instance, fashions itself as fact-checking website tackling anti-Israel information, containing articles discrediting slain journalists as Hamas terrorists and rejecting the notion that Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide. Paxpoint.org, meanwhile, promotes the narrative that Israel is a nation of peace.
All of Parscale’s websites contain a statement at the bottom which states “this material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel.” This statement is a mandatory disclosure requirement under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Despite this, when Drop Site asked prominent chatbots about the latest news from Paxpoint.org, Perplexity and Copilot did not flag that the site was created as part of an Israeli influence operation. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini did flag the caveat.
“Perplexity is built to give people cited, linked answers from a range of sources so they can go directly to the original reporting and reach their own conclusions,” spokesperson Beejoli Shah told Drop Site News when reached for comment.
Parscale’s websites—referred to throughout this article as the “Clock Tower network”—get cited by chatbots, but they also are successfully infiltrating the underlying training data.
The Clock Tower network started to get archived by Common Crawl—a nonprofit that oversees a massive repository of data used to train large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—earlier this year. Common Crawl is the backbone of the artificial industry, training 80% of the tokens of OpenAI’s GPT-3, making it a useful proxy for understanding if malicious actors successfully infiltrate AI training data.
In the examples above, users can at least trace the sources that chatbots are pulling from when they search websites directly, such as in the screenshots above. Infiltrating the training data itself, on the other hand, can lead to Israel-influenced responses that are nearly impossible for users to trace.
To measure how deeply the network had penetrated the data used to train AI models, Drop Site used Claude Fable to query Common Crawl to count how often Parscale’s sites appear in its monthly snapshots. According to that analysis, a sample of which was manually fact-checked by Drop Site, between January and June 10 sites were crawled by Common Crawl 912 times. While this is a drop in the bucket of Common Crawl data, emerging research suggests a very low number of documents can successfully manipulate AI chatbots, no matter the data volume.
The 10 sites are:
Paxpoint.org (crawled 220 times): Website dedicated to showcasing the narrative that Israel is a nation of peace. “Paxpoint highlights Israel’s ongoing commitment to peace and coexistence, sharing historical accords, humanitarian initiatives, and grassroots projects that bridge divides.”
Allyvia.org (crawled 158 times): Website dedicated to strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance. “Allyvia showcases how the US and Israel alliance directly benefits Americans through joint security, cutting-edge technologies, job creation, and shared values of liberty.”
Factsignal.org (crawled 108 times): Mission is to “prove that Hamas’ terrorist designation reflects global consensus and undeniable evidence of violence, not conspiracy”
Cognitura.org (crawled 106 times): Website claims to be a “research and education platform” dedicated to exploring how extremist groups such as Hamas operate.
Justorium.org (crawled 93 times): Website dedicated to arguing that Israel’s military actions in Gaza “follows international law and reflects the democratic ethics shared by the US and Israel.”
Culturavia.org (crawled 76 times): Website focused on celebrating cultural ties between U.S. and Israel.
Compassionpulse.org (crawled 57 times): Website dedicated to sharing stories, data, and eyewitness accounts of “how Israel protects civilians, delivers humanitarian aid, and upholds moral values shared with the US.”
Feedingyoufiction.com (crawled 1 time): Website featuring videos that claim footage coming out Gaza is staged and denying famine.
These sites are being crawled more and more. In January 2026, the sites were only crawled twice. In May, the sites were crawled 376 times, before a notable dip in June. To check the accuracy of Claude Fable, Drop Site manually searched for a sampling of 50 of the Clock Tower X URLs archived in Common Crawl’s CDXJ index, and did not detect any errors.
Hervé Letoqueux, Chief Executive Officer at Check First, an organization that combats digital disinformation, explained that Common Crawl’s status as the go-to source for training chatbots opens it up as a target for manipulation. “Common Crawl is widely used in the world of data science for training LLMs, which also means that actors want to manipulate the answers in their favor, which some studies have indicated are fairly easy to do.”
It only takes about “250 malicious documents to produce a ‘backdoor’ vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size of training data volume,” according to an October Anthropic study. The authors of the study note “this means anyone can create online content that might eventually end up in a model’s training data,” and that malicious actors “can inject specific text into these posts to make a model learn undesirable or dangerous behaviours, in a process known as poisoning.”
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab published a similar study earlier this year on Russia’s disinformation network’s attempts to influence LLMs and noted an important caveat. Because artificial intelligence companies have their own process of quality control when they incorporate data, “Inclusion in Common Crawl does not guarantee inclusion in any given model’s training data.”
Drop Site also performed a demo alongside Letoqueux to test five different chatbots—Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude AI, and Perplexity—on whether they could produce articles using only their training data. Of the five, the Parscale network consistently appears in the training data of Gemini and Copilot. Claude and ChatGPT did not appear to contain the websites in the training data, though these chatbots can still search Clock Tower X websites when responding to queries. Perplexity, meanwhile, appeared to be trained on some of the Clock Tower X websites.
Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
‘It is easy to prove that these models were trained on the Clock Tower X websites, though it is difficult to know the degree to which that influences the response a chatbot gives to a query,’ said Letoqueux.
Optimizing for AI
Parscale’s team has credited their success with a softer approach to selling Israel’s narrative. Scott Stouffer, Chief Technology Officer of Market Brew—a company that specializes in influencing LLMs that Parscale invests in—told Axios that information written in a “factual tone and tightly organized” is more likely to be cited in AI platforms. “What you can do is make sure that your information is structured, sourced, and aligned in a way that those systems are more likely to retrieve it when someone asks a question. It’s less about changing the conversation and more about making sure your facts are eligible to be part of it.”
Many of the blog posts on the Clock Tower network contain at least a few sentences of nuance, which disinformation researchers say make it more palatable for chatbots. For instance, the FactSignal blog post about how journalists in Gaza are supposedly secret terrorists states that, “Distinguishing between legitimate reporters and militant operatives is not always simple, but accurate reporting requires careful investigation and transparency.”
The author of many of the blog posts is Israel-based digital marketer Mark Ginsberg, according to the source code. Ginsberg, who registered as a foreign agent for Israel in March, advertises his expertise in Generative Engine Optimization—or LLM grooming—on his Linkedin profile. In a June article for The Times of Israel, Ginsberg laid out the argument for Israel investing in efforts to influence chatbots. “Israel needs to invest seriously in the defense of truth…It means ensuring that accurate information appears not merely in government archives but in search results, educational resources, encyclopedias, social media feeds, podcasts, documentaries, and AI training datasets,” Ginsberg wrote. Trying to influence AI training data, Ginsberg argued, is not “embracing disinformation” but rather stating “reality itself.”
Letoqueux, who reviewed the Clock Tower network sites, confirmed that because chatbots have a built-in preference for presenting a balanced view, websites that are sourced and present a lighter touch might be more successful. “These websites could probably be quite useful at doing damage control on questions such as ‘Is Israel committing a genocide?’ because they provide the Israeli narrative, which chatbots can then repeat as representative of one side of the debate,” said Letoqueux, who is the former head of operations at VIGINUM, the French agency responsible for identifying foreign digital interference.
Alice Lee, an analyst at NewsGuard, a disinformation tracking company, explained in an interview with Drop Site that the Parscale network sites have all the hallmarks of sites that would be successful at influencing chatbots. “The websites have bullet points, key takeaways at the top of the page, aggressive sourcing, digestible information, all of which increase the likelihood that this content is picked up by AI chatbots.”
While Russia’s Pravda network overall is far larger, Parscale’s sites have a far higher rate of successfully being archived. The Clock Tower network contains 900 different pathways—individual blog posts, fact sheets, etc—and 85% of them have been archived in Common Crawl, compared to Russia’s network at an average rate of around 2.5%.
Lee, who specializes in Russian disinformation, explained that whereas Russia is churning out easily debunkable propaganda at scale, Israel’s more targeted approach appears to be geared more toward conveying the Israeli narrative on half-truths, opinions, and disputed facts, which is more difficult for LLMs to dismiss. “It’s harder to put guardrails around opinion,” she explained.
Parscale appears to have created several other websites related to Qatar that did not end up being published. On the same IP address as the Clock Tower network, Drop Site identified domains for websites including “qataritracker.org” and “qatarfacts.com.” These sites are currently inaccessible.
The Clock Tower network is responsive to Israel’s shifting priorities. When the sites first launched in October, many of them posted frequently about how Israel is a peaceful nation. “While critics portray Israel as resistant to compromise, history shows the opposite: Israel has repeatedly made territorial and strategic concessions in exchange for peace, only to face renewed hostility,” reads one website page published in October, cited by Microsoft Copilot below. That page was archived by Common Crawl twice.
Screenshot of Copilot citing a Clock Tower X site.
Part of this effort included shaping the narrative over Israel’s military actions in Gaza. For instance, a page on Justorium.org titled “How Israel Reduces Civilian Harm in War Against Hamas and Hezbollah” claims that Israel went above and beyond international legal requirements to reduce civilian harm. The post says that Israel “used short warning strikes on rooftops, known as roof knocking, to signal imminent danger without causing casualties.” The New York Times has reported that Israel “significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks” from the first day of the war, and has often opted for 2,000 pound bombs that cause greater damage rather than more precise munitions.
That post has been archived by Common Crawl once, and is also cited below by Perplexity.
Screenshot of Perplexity citing from a Clock Tower X site.
Most recently, as debate in the U.S. erupted over a Congressional measure that could further intertwine the U.S. and Israeli military sectors, the Clock Tower network published a series of posts framing the move as a positive development. The House version of Section 219, as it’s known, passed as part of the annual defense spending bill this week.
When Drop Site asked prominent chatbots a question containing similar language from one of the Parscale sites, “how does technology collaboration between the U.S. and Israel benefit both nations?” Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity once again cited websites from the Clock Tower network without noting these sources are created on behalf of the Israeli government.
Screenshot of Gemini citing a Clock Tower X site.
Screenshot of Copilot citing two Clock Tower X sites.
$4.5 Million a Month
Public opinion of Israel has cratered in the U.S. after its U.S.-funded military siege of Gaza has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, including across key demographics such as conservatives and evangelicals that have long supported the U.S.-Israel relationship.
According to a new Quincy Institute report by the author of this article, Israel has spent well-over $100 million on foreign lobbying efforts under FARA in the U.S. since 2023, hiring 17 new firms in 2024 and 2025 alone. Although Israel has historically avoided hiring official contractors under FARA, it is now on track to become the largest single spender in 2026.
Parscale, who gained national attention as Trump’s campaign manager for hiring the controversial microtargetting firm Cambridge Analytica, is the largest recipient of Israel’s massive influence investment. Parscale’s intention to influence chatbots was first reported by Responsible Statecraft in September, when he signed a $1.5 million a month contract with the Israeli government to integrate pro-Israel messaging into conservative media, carry out a mass texting campaign, and influence chatbots. Since then, the contract has tripled in size to $4.5 million a month.
Despite this increased investment, Israel does not appear satisfied with Parscale’s results so far. “We pissed at Brad Parscale,” one Israeli official familiar with the contract told Time. “We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse,” they said.
Stephen Walt, author of the “Israel Lobby,” suggested to the Quincy Institute that Israel is not seeing a return on investment because these kinds of influence operations are counterproductive. “Once a country gets the reputation for spinning constantly, and gets repeatedly caught making things up, then doing ever more of it just sends the message to listeners that more BS is on the way,” Walt said.
Parscale and Clock Tower X did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
The Clock Tower network serves another purpose. Parscale is also leading a mass texting campaign that reaches out to Americans under the auspices of supposed “peace” organizations. “Hi, I’m John with Friends for Peace. Quick question for folks in Illinois about Israel and Iran. Got a second?”
Then, after a back and forth, these chatbots frequently send links to the Clock Tower network, websites like Allyvia.org.
Text messages from “Friends for Peace.”
Text messages from “Friends for Peace.”
“Friends for Peace” is not a registered nonprofit or LLC and does not appear to exist as an organization, meaning Americans wanting to know who is behind the text operation would have to click the link and scroll to the bottom of each page to see the disclaimer that it is an operation funded by the Israeli government.
When the Wall Street Journal asked Parscale about if “Friends for Peace” was a real organization, Parscale replied, “What do you define as an actual organization?”
The Federal Highway Administration quietly stripped bike lanes and other safety recommendations from a key list of best practices. Critics say those measures are proven to cut crashes and save lives.
US Secretary of the Treasury Scott BessentMandel NGAN / AFP - Getty Images
Despite concerns from debt hawks, the U.S. government is continuing to borrow at pace: For the fiscal year of 2026 so far, the federal deficit has totaled just under $1.4 trillion.
The first nine months of this fiscal year (beginning in October) have now surpassed the borrowing levels of 2025, when deficits totaled just over $1.3 trillion for the same period.
At the time of writing, the total U.S. national debt sits at $39.4 trillion, accumulated under administrations led by both Republicans and Democrats.
As such, the monthly borrowing for 2026 now sits at roughly $155 billion, or $39 billion per week. And, like any borrower, that debt carries an interest cost. The latest monthly budget review from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirms that net interest on public debt for the fiscal year has hit $857 billion: roughly $23.8 billion a week.
This is approximately $100 billion more (13%) than the interest paid out in the first nine months of 2025, the CBO adds, owing to a higher total debt burden than last year and higher long-term interest rates.
In fact, interest payments on the debt are now $20 billion larger than the outlays for the Departments of Defense, Commerce, Homeland Security, Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, and the U.S. Coronavirus Refundable Credits scheme—combined.
Also contributing to the demand on government purse springs is the increasing demand for social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Spending for Social Security benefits rose by $62 billion (or 5%) because of increases in average benefits and in the number of beneficiaries, CBO noted. In comparison, Medicare outlays increased by $58 billion (8%) due to higher enrollment and higher payment rates for services. Rising costs per enrollee meant Medicaid spending increased by $49 billion (10%).
This is a trend that isn’t going anywhere: The U.S. population is aging. According to the Census Bureau, Americans’ median age—the age at which half of the population is younger, and half is older — continues to rise, climbing from 39.2 in 2024 to 39.4 in 2025.
Men’s share of the older population is particularly of note, the bureau adds. In 2001, there were 70.6 males for every 100 females age 65 and older, but by 2025, the ratio had increased substantially to 81.6.
With the factors influencing Treasury spending only embedding further over the coming decades, those concerned about the U.S. fiscal trajectory are calling for action.
The latest CBO estimates have alarmed the likes of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget which, for a long time, has been lobbying the government to address its borrowing.
In a statement shared with Fortune, Maya MacGuineas, president of the committee, said: “The FY 2026 deficit has now passed the FY 2025 deficit–and it is likely to stay that way for the rest of the fiscal year … We will likely borrow $2 trillion or more this fiscal year—an astounding figure given that the economy keeps growing and unemployment is low.”
The current situation is “likely the tip of the iceberg,” MacGuineas adds, if policymakers don’t make changes to entitlements and “ignore the need to cut spending and increase revenues,” she adds: “Social Security and Medicare are within seven years of trust fund exhaustion, and action needs to be taken to prevent across-the-board cuts to both programs.”
MacGuineas advocated targeting a deficit of 3% of GDP, roughly half its current level, a proposal that has gained support across the political spectrum. But she also added that “more importantly,” politicians should be “honest with the public about the grave dangers we face by remaining on this unsustainable path.”
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It’s been a brutal tactic deployed by local and federal law enforcement officials time and time again over the past year: using teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to control protests outside ICE detention centers or during enforcement operations.
Now, a new report lays bare the scale of the use of these crowd-control weapons during anti-immigration demonstrations across the US, including hundreds of incidents that resulted in lasting and traumatic injuries.
The report and an interactive map was created by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley (HRC) and released this week. Doctorsand human rights experts with PHR and HRC documented 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of these crowd-control weapons, also known as “less-lethal weapons”, from June 2025 through May 2026.
“This is a concerning story,” said Dr Rohini Haar, the lead author of the report and a PHR medical expert, in an interview.
The report documented 203 injuries stemming from the alleged misuse of the crowd-control weapons. Some of the injuries included blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions.
The researchers struggled to confirm the full scale of the injuries, because “visual investigative techniques cannot adequately assess invisible injuries, such as chemical injury or chronic pain or hearing loss”.
“The true number of injuries is likely far greater,” the report adds.
Such tactics were on display earlier this summer, when dozens of protesters gathered outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, in solidarity with detained immigrants on hunger strike. As protests became more and more heated, a line of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials stood outside to guard the detention center.
During a scuffle, ICE officials pepper sprayed Andy Kim, a New Jersey senator, making national news and helping set off one of the country’s flashpoints in demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations.
State police officers stand behind shields as tear gas fills the area outside the Delaney Hall detention center during a protest in Newark, New Jersey. Photograph: Andrés Kudacki/AP
In the days and weeks that followed, local and state officers also moved in on protesters, using batons and shields, deploying teargas canisters and arresting dozens. Many were injured during the demonstrations outside Delaney Hall by the crowd-control weapons that the local, state and federal officers used.
The use of crowd-control weapons in New Jersey was not new – local, state and federal law enforcement officers have used them nationwide on protesters opposing the aggressive anti-immigrant arrests, detentions and deportations.
But their use has become widespread as the backlash against Trump’s immigration crackdown has grown – prompting researchers to track down incidents and the types of weapons used nationwide, and to establish a map where readers can see how those weapons have been used in their communities.
Haar began working on the report after she saw news of a pastor being blasted in the face with a chemical weapon by a federal official in Oakland. Haar and PHR have been researching the impacts of crowd-control weapons for years.
“Those weapons can cause harm,” Haar added. “It’s just when they’re used, how they’re used and if they’re used.”
DHS did not respond to inquiries about the report’s findings before publication.
The crowd-control weapons include chemical irritants, including teargas, pepper spray and Mace, along with “kinetic impact projectiles”, which include rubber bullets and bean bag rounds. Researchers with PHR and HRC also documented the use of stun grenades, water cannons and other “improvised” weapons, like horses and riot police shields.
Haar explained that they qualified “misuse” by a number of methods. First, they tracked whether people in “protected categories”, including journalists and health workers, were targeted by officials. Next, they documented whether vulnerable populations, including older people and children, were affected. And lastly, they tracked whether the weapons were used improperly, like using the weapons in close range, targeting people’s heads or going against the weapons’ manufacturing guidelines.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fires teargas toward demonstrators and members of the press at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility. Photograph: Olga Fedorova/EPA
A report from earlier this year by ProPublica identified 70 children across the US who had been harmed by teargas or pepper spray – not just at protests, but during immigration enforcement operations as well.
On a national level, officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), like ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, were responsible for over half of all misuse incidents – 64%. But local law enforcement officers also played a role in many incidents.
“The involvement of state and local [authorities] is also concerning,” Haar added. “Because in many places, they’re coming on top of what is already happening with DHS. But in places like Los Angeles, there is a lot more involvement [of local law enforcement officials].”
The researchers found that there was an increase in the use of these weapons during immigration enforcement surge operations under the command of former border patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, who took a hardline approach to his enforcement tactics. After the shooting deaths of two US citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration officials, Bovino was pulled from his position. He became critical of the Trump administration, accusing them of not taking a tough-enough approach, and retired in March of this year.
“In each city where there were federal directions to escalate enforcement, incident counts rose sharply within days,” PHR said in a statement announcing the report and the map. “Much of this was coincident with the arrival of Greg Bovino.”
“Many of the enforcement operations that coincided with spikes in documented misuse were also promoted through public social media accounts, including Bovino’s,” PHR continued.
For researchers, the scale of the use of the crowd-control weapons harkened back to law enforcement’s response to the 2020 racial justice protests. That year, protesters throughout the country took to the streets to protest police killings of Black people throughout the US. And in some cities, the border patrol’s elite unit participated in arrests and crowd-control operations.
Since June 2025, mass protests have erupted in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Newark and Portland. The report documented that over 90% of the documented “misuse” incidents happened in those regions.
DHS and local law enforcement officials have fallen under repeated criticism for their response to the protests and their aggressive use of force. Since January of 2025, federal immigration officials with DHS have been responsible for at least 11 shooting deaths. The two most recent fatal shootings by immigration authorities took place this month, less than one week apart, in Texas and in Maine.
On 7 July, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction worker, during an arrest operation in Houston as he drove his work van. And on Monday, a 26-year-old Colombian man was shot and killed by a federal official in Biddeford, Maine, DHS confirmed.
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