Eric Rotsten

Entrepreneur, traveler, eternal optimist

[Eric Rotsten @EricRotsten]

Ouch!

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Hello Mr. Platner,

Ratio.

That's it. That's the whole rebuttal.

You are someone who, by the virtue of his Reddit posts, manages to be simultaneously a filthy-literal-Communist and anti-Semite. That in itself is an egregious sin, because literal, card-carrying Communists are fundamentally at odds with America's norms.

But if that weren't enough, you have voluminous Reddit posts defending the Nazi Totenkopf symbol. You clearly knew the tattoo you got and you defended it publicly. There's no either/or way about it.

Scum attracts scum. Which is why you can comfortably swim in both literal-Communist and literal-antisemitic far-right circles.

I am no fan of Sue Collins. But the fact you are running against her, that you have even the smallest chance of defeating her --

you, as someone who is a self-admitted Communist, someone who has Nazi sympathies -- not to mention all the horrific, personal-life stuff --

You are the worst candidate in history, right AND left. You are the authoritarian evil that every "democracy" group speaks about, yet they will hypocritically not say a word against because they believe that being anti-Trump is more important than allying with Communists or Nazis.

You are not "populist." On the contrary:

You are the perfected example of how liberal democracy has rotted so far that they'd rather stay silent about you, hoping you'll win against the most moderate Republican in the Senate, than to hand Trump the possibility of retaining the Senate.

[Richard Grenell @RichardGrenell]

You said @XavierBecerra was unfit to hold public office.

You spent millions of dollars saying he could be indicted next.

And now you change your mind on him?
What a politician!

[Liz Wheeler @Liz_Wheeler]

Attorney Will Chamberlain’s BRILLIANT idea to fix California's election ballot counting.

Speaker Mike Jonson has the authority to REFUSE to seat Representatives from California.

"Article 1 Section 5 says each House is the judge of the qualifications of its own members.”

“So, here's my basic idea: Mike Johnson in the House when it comes time to actually seat the representatives from California—any representative who wasn't ahead on election day, you don't even provisionally seat them. And you refer to them the committee that evaluates these things… And they have to show up and prove that they've won legitimately. And if they can't do that, then they don't get sat and California can go back and do a special election again."

"If Republicans simply say, 'We think your election results are toilet paper, and we're the judge of our own members. So, we're just not going to seat you.”

“Like, up to you guys if you want to change how your election processes work in the next six months, do it or don't. But if you don't, and you want us to seat people who then win in this bizarre and manner, well, we're just not going to do it."

[AmericanGreatness @NONbiasedly]

Democrats could have let Spencer Pratt take 2nd, then easily defeated him in Nov:

"See, our elections aren't rigged. We let a MAGA friendly win".

Instead, they have fomented total unified visceral utter disgust. The Nation was glued to every single count, watched a 7%-point lead evaporate days after the physical voting ended.

The Establishment fucked up (John Thune, the most hated man in America). They treated this like a sleepy, localized primary that they could manage through standard, bureaucratic slow-rolling. Their ruthless public pursuit of power blinded them that entire country is hyper-sensitized to election integrity RN (thanks be to Trump).

By pushing Nithya Raman past Pratt by a razor-thin margin of 3,113 votes on a Sun. night, they lit a powder keg under the Nation, a 11.0 earthquake.

BS you say?
Read any comments, any local national MSM or any few daring to defend CA elections, on any SM platform. The vitriol of disgust hatred utter contempt for Democrats & RINOs corruption has unified a once deeply divided country.

They thought they were quietly securing a predictable Bass vs. Raman runoff for November. Instead, their smug pretentious Marie Antoinette-esque hatred brought together — the Left, the center, the Right — a shared outrage, turned a local mayoral primary into a national symbol of institutional corruption. They underestimated the public's boiling point, and now they have no idea how to contain the blowback. They so fucked themselves. Psychopathic doesn't even come close. They have healed a broken polarized country, once unimaginable.

Thank you Spencer for your unwavering courage. Thank you Trump for your fierce bellicosity. Thank you Dumocrats for destroying your own party. Thank you Thune, McConnell, Murkowski, Collins, Tillis... the most despised humans in Nation.

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

Good

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

I have a question. How is it possible that AFTER Election Day, all ballots being dropped heavily go to the 3rd place candidate, and not #1 or #2?

What are the statistical odds? Has it ever happened?

Seems impossible to me. How about you?

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

Remember:

The very purpose of mail-in ballots, no-ID laws, ballot harvesting and ballot drop boxes is to make it virtually impossible to prove widespread fraud while widespread fraud nevertheless routinely occurs.

[ThePersistence @ScottPresler]

Elon,

In order to defeat Senator Lisa Murkowski in 2028, we first have to DEFEAT Ranked Choice Voting.

There is an initiative on the ballot this year in Alaska to defeat RCV:

✅ Alaska Ballot Measure 2

A YES vote would eliminate RCV.

“Vote YES to end the MESS.”

By the way, Governor Dunleavy has already signaled he will run against her.

Can we chat?

@elonmusk

[Bad Hombre @Badhombre]

Reminder that Chinese spy Christine Fang (Fang Fang) worked for Ro Khanna’s 2014 congressional campaign.

This is why Ro has never commented publicly on the matter and why he opposes the FBI releasing the entirety of the Fang Fang files. He’s all over them.

[Denise Aguilar @InformedMama209]

Gov. Gavin Newsom said he has a secret “break the glass” plan to prevent California from electing a Republican governor. He recently signed a law that states mail in ballots signatures do not have to match.
SB73 Section 3. Clause F reads : (f) A vote by mail voter observer shall not be permitted to challenge a signature on a vote by mail ballot return envelope pursuant to subdivision (a) of Section 3019, or on statements completed pursuant to subdivisions (d) and (e) of Section 3019, on the basis that they believe the signature does not compare with the signatures appearing in the voter’s registration record.

There’s no election integrity in California.
❌ Mail in ballots to every Californian and even if you moved state, you’ll still get a ballot.
❌ signatures do not need to match
❌ unsecured drop boxes that get vandalized and set on fire
❌ months of counting with ballots being flown in by helicopter.
❌ No voter ID
❌ “Honor system” for voter registration.

Until election integrity is addressed we will never have a balanced state.

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

Republicans have the power to set a particular date as Election Day going forward. They have the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. Common sense Voter ID and a mandatory Election Day would be the end of the Democrat Party.

Why won’t they do it?

[Zeek Arkham 🇺🇸 @ZeekArkham]

I can tell you all as law enforcement, when criminals know they can get away with doing a crime, they’ll do it over and over again. They’ll get bolder, they’ll start doing it out in the open, and they’ll stop caring who sees them. They know they’re going to get away with it anyway, so any threat of consequences becomes null.

When you have a political party blatantly cheating in front of us in order to influence elections while nothing is being done about it, you have to start asking who’s complicit in it and why is nothing being done about it. It’s obvious, it’s apparent, and it’s criminal.

I’m not going to expect any Democrat to vote for the SAVE Act, but any Republican who doesn’t needs to be primaried and moved out of office for someone who will.

Stop the criminality.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This is how Democrats stay in power in California

US Attorney Bill Essayli was kicked off the Elections Committee by Democrats for fighting for Voter ID

🚨 He exposed how the State’s website allows ANYONE to receive mail in ballots without a drivers license or social security. You simply check the box, ‘I don’t have one’ and are sent a ballot

“The Democrats in our legislature in Sacramento kicked me off my elections committee for fighting for you, the voters, and speaking up on voter id”

“I'm on the website for the State of California to register to vote on the section where you put in your driver's license, your last four of your social, there's a box underneath each one. It says, I don't have one. I don't have one. And then you're allowed to proceed to go to vote. What is the agenda here? Why do we let people register to vote and we don't verify their immigration status? We need to instill confidence in our elections”

Here’s how Democrats rig elections with those mail in ballots

California moved aggressively toward universal mail-in ballots. Key steps included:

- 2016-2018: Laws like the Voter’s Choice Act expanded vote-by-mail options.

- 2020+ Permanent universal mail-in ballots, every registered voter gets a ballot mailed automatically

Ballot harvesting third parties collecting and delivering ballots was also legalized and expanded

The finishing blow: In 2024 SB 1174 was signed. It locked in the statewide no-ID standard

And that right there is how you permanently rig elections forever

No one can ever beat this voter fraud

We need a federal audit of California elections

The punishment for election fraud should be equivalent to the punishment for treason, because that’s exactly what it is

[Steven Crowder @scrowder]

This idea of mass mail-in voting is not normal. You are being conditioned to accept a system designed to accommodate fraud as normal. It is not normal.

Here’s how you solve it:
-Ban mail-in voting
-Require voter ID and proof of citizenship

It’s that simple.

[Zeek Arkham 🇺🇸 @ZeekArkham]

The California elections prove one thing to me:

Leftists are truly in a cult. That, or their thinking is very cult-like.

If I lived in a city where there was garbage on the streets, open drug use, fires and destruction, graffiti, and the *one* person who could directly do something about it was like “this is horrible… someone should do something about this…” you can bet your sweet Aunt Petunia I’d be voting for the guy who is telling everyone he’s going to do something about it.

Instead, they’ll sit in their filth and grime and say “this is fine… as long as a Republican isn’t in charge, this is fine.”

Someone make it make sense to me…

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

California keeps dumping votes. Odds are shifting because the vote dumps always seem to go one way.

Count until you get the result you want?

[Reverend Jordan Wells @WellsJorda89710]

🚨 THIS IS DISGUSTING. What we’re watching in California is election corruption in plain sight.
NBC just admitted it: “They’d need a flood of ballots coming in the wee hours of the morning to lift both Dems above (R) Steve Hilton.”

While Florida and Texas had clear results on election night, California drags it out with mysterious late-night ballot dumps.
This isn’t democracy. This is how a corrupt one-party state cheats to stay in power.
Enough.

If Republicans like John Thune actually fought back and demanded real election integrity reforms — paper ballots, same-day counting, voter ID, no more hidden mail-ins — we could stop this.

Californians deserve better. Steve Hilton is fighting for real change. Share if you’re tired of the games.
#StopTheStealCA #HiltonForGovernor #ElectionIntegrityNow

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Finally getting over the asthma - and here's the org chart of the Newark protests, as promised. A few are missing, particularly the Catholic NGOs. But this is the basic template for how mass protests are coordinated so quickly.