Republican lawmakers in Indiana voted to strip state funding from the Kinsey Institute, the human sexuality research organization housed at Indiana University, over debunked, decades-old claims that its founder supported pedophilia and opposition to its support of gender-affirming care for transgender people. The move comes amid conservatives nationwide smearing LGBTQ people as “groomers” and trying to ban trans healthcare.

State Rep. Lorissa Sweet (R) introduced an amendment to the state budget bill that would ban IU from using state money to support the Kinsey Institute. (There is no line item in the state budget for the institute, rather the university receives state funding.) Sweet alleged without evidence that the institute has been supporting and harboring sexual predators. “By limiting the funding to Kinsey Institute through Indiana University’s tax dollars, we can be assured that we are not funding ongoing research committed by crimes,” Sweet said.

Rep. Matt Pierce (D), whose district includes Indiana University, said Sweet’s claims were “based on old unproven allegations of conspiracies that did not exist” and called them “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back.”

The amendment passed Wednesday by a vote was 53-34, with seven Republicans joining all Democrats to oppose it. It will now go to the Senate for consideration, though the budget bill isn’t expected to be finalized until late April.

The founder of the Kinsey Institute, Alfred Kinsey, published landmark sex research as an IU faculty member in 1948 and 1953 and died in 1956. He was depicted in the 2004 film Kinsey. Here’s how the Indy Star describes the debunked claim:

Kinsey, who joined the IU faculty in 1920, published his landmark works, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” in 1948 and 1953, respectively. He produced the tomes by collecting survey data on sexual behavior from more than 18,000 participants. The controversy surrounding him largely lies in that data, which includes responses from pedophiles. Some critics have accused him of encouraging sexual experimentation on children, though no evidence to support that has been produced and no charges were ever brought against him.

Rep. Cindy Ledbetter (R) said she voted yes because her required continuing education as a nurse practitioner has included Kinsey Institute training on administering gender-affirming medications to transgender minors. “I don’t understand why we would fund that in our state,” Ledbetter said, per the Indy Star. “We don’t want to eat chicken that’s injected with hormones. Why would we inject them into our children?” (Cindy, did you just compare children to livestock that are slaughtered and sold for food?) Also on Wednesday, the state senate advanced a bill to ban gender-affirming care for minors, as if there was any doubt on what this was about.

Pierce also said his Republican colleagues who supported the amendment were acting out of fear. “They can’t make a rational decision anymore in this body because they have to worry about some crazy people knocking them out in a primary,” Pierce said after the vote, according to an Indiana NPR affiliate. Sweet herself ousted 20-year incumbent Rep. Dan Leonard in a primary last year.

Meanwhile, Sweet has a pet grooming business called Sweet Grooms, but her handle on an inactive Twitter account is hilariously @sweetgroomer. The header on her old blog reads “Groomed by God.”

On Thursday, President Donald Trump dealt yet another crushing blow to the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement with his latest betrayal of the squadrons of health-obsessed mothers who helped to return him to office despite numerous indictments. Sorry, I should have been more specific–doing things directly counter to MAHA is actually something that Trump does on such a regular basis that we need finer detail on what he’s done this time to thwart their goals to revamp the American health system. Specifically, I’m talking about Trump’s decision to withdraw the nomination of Dr. Casey Means for the post of Surgeon General, depriving the movement of one of its most popular figureheads, a symbol of “MAHA Moms” everywhere.

It was perfectly in character for Trump to do so: After all, his administration has embraced the expanded production of cancer-causing herbicides that MAHA abhors, and is defending those same chemical corporations in a current Supreme Court case that would limit the ability of Americans to sue herbicide/pesticide manufacturers for negative health consequences of being exposed to them. The same administration has loosened numerous environmental regulations keeping toxins such as mercury from being unleashed into our food supply, all while RFK Jr., the supposed leader of the MAHA movement, has utterly refused to disagree with Trump on the dismantling of his life’s work, becoming the saddest single man in the Trump administration in the process.

Not that you would really know any of this, if you were simply following MAHA influencers on social networks like Facebook or Twitter. In those venues, the cheerful conservative sellouts walk a delicate line where they must observe all of the bad things happening that undermine their movement, and then go as far out of their way as possible to avoid blaming Donald Trump or RFK Jr. for decisions made by Donald Trump or RFK Jr. The continuation of the MAHA grift for this particular influencer class becomes a game of finding or making up minor or moral victories to trumpet, while ignoring the massive L’s that are constantly thrust upon them by their movement’s deities. The dumping of doctor and wellness influencer Casey Means is just the latest instance of Trump deciding that he doesn’t give a shit about the priorities of his MAHA coalition, and the latest thing they’ll be forced to largely ignore in order to continue supporting Trump.

It was only a couple of weeks ago, in fact, that the White House, looking to shore up its get-out-the-vote enthusiasm among this specific demographic, specifically invited a cadre of MAHA influencers to the Oval Office, to meet with not only Trump and resident creatures like Stephen Miller, but also Dr. Means. There, MAHA influencers like Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark begged Trump to get the Means nomination for Surgeon General across the finish line of confirmation in the Senate, saying that confirming her was utterly “essential” to prove to the legions of MAHA moms that Trump and RFK Jr. were serious about installing members of the movement in positions of real power. As Clark reportedly put it at the time, “She [Means] is trustworthy to the MAHA base.” Trump responded to those overtures by pulling her nomination today.

One might expect the reaction from an influencer like the aforementioned Clark to be anger toward Trump and RFK Jr., for failing to stand behind Dr. Means, to leverage Trump’s near-total, monolithic power over the Republican party to get the nomination confirmed. Instead, though, Clark and the other MAHA influencer bots received their marching orders to solely blame Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (LA), the chairman of the Senate health committee, with Trump himself declaring that Cassidy had “stood in the way.” This overlooks, of course, the fact that Sens. Susan Collins (ME) and Lisa Murkowski (AL) also seemed unlikely to confirm Means, likely due more than anything to her RFK Jr.-informed penchant for vaccine disinformation. In confirmation hearings, Means said she believes vaccines “save lives,” but simultaneously refused to say that she supported universal vaccination against diseases such as measles, which has been surging to historic highs in the U.S. within the last two years. It is not yet fully clear where Trump’s new third nominee for the post of Surgeon General, radiologist and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center doctor Nicole B. Saphier, stands on the vaccine issue, but she’s almost certain to be less palatable to the MAHA contingent overall, when Casey Means was regularly touted as being one of their own. Saphier, a regular Fox News guest, has already locked her Twitter account, which is … not at all troubling!

But regardless, there was never a genuine chance that an influencer like Alex Clark could afford to state the obvious, that Trump is the one ultimately making these decisions–he kicked Means to the curb because he wanted to get the confirmation done, and the continued resistance to her reflected poorly on him. At the end of the day, how he is affected by any of these people is his only real concern … and someone who works for Turning Point USA is inevitably going to understand that.

Still, there are points when Trump’s deeply anti-MAHA moves have clearly frustrated even a dyed-in-the-wool political operative like Clark. The most notable was no doubt his February executive order in which he commanded that production of the MAHA boogeyman herbicide gylphosate be boosted and protected under the Defense Production Act, calling it “critical to the national defense,” despite the fact that his own head of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been one of the key lawyers who first secured a judgement against Roundup weedkiller (made with glyphosate) producer Bayer on behalf of a client who claimed the product was responsible for his cancer. Worse still, his total control over RFK Jr. resulted in the head of the MAHA movement putting out a statement in support of the move to boost production of the stuff that Kennedy had long called carcinogenic.

“Women feel like they were lied to, that MAHA movement is a sham,” said Alex Clark at the time, venting frustration that she has now tried to walk back. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.”

Note the wording, and the priorities here. Clark doesn’t question how the MAHA movement can achieve its objectives, or question “which candidates actually represent our stated views?” Instead, it’s simply “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms?” She tips her hand in the process, not even bothering to ask or answer the question of why “voting red” is meant to inexorably be seen as the outcome that is best for their goals. Why should it be the default, when the MAGA Republicans represented by Trump consistently demonstrate that they’d rather be allied with Big Ag and Big Chem than with the priorities of the MAHA believers? Are we so certain that, at least on issues like pesticides/herbicides (vaccines are a non-starter), congressional Democrats might not make for more receptive potential allies for these constituents?

Such is the perennial issue at the heart of MAHA, an ideology that is inherently in conflict with itself due to its embrace of a “big tent” of conspiracy and genuine science. On one hand, the food-based views of MAHA are generally widely popular with the American population, especially when it comes to topics like an increased presence of clear labeling, warning labels and limited use of scary “chemicals,” although good luck in actually getting most of these people to voluntarily pay more for organic food. But on the other side of the equation, MAHA’s trademark vaccine hesitancy is deeply unpopular with the rank and file American, the vast majority of whom, for instance, still get their children vaccinated with the full childhood vaccine schedule despite concerning declines.

On Thursday, even as they were trying to put the best possible face on the dismissal of Dr. Casey Means, MAHA influencers were reveling in another small victory: An amendment was successfully tacked on the House passage of the 2026 Farm Bill, to remove language that would have shielded pesticide and herbicide manufacturers from legal action by American consumers. Effectively, the amendment would allow states to be able to do things like add warning labels to products in which pesticides might have been used, although it’s very unclear what this would actually look like–presumably we are not talking about warnings laser-etched into the sides of tomatoes and bell peppers. Any gain here could likewise be undone by the results of the U.S. Supreme Court case involving glyphosate that is currently being argued … in which the federal government is on the side of Roundup maker Bayer.

What is so interesting about the amendment to the Farm Bill, however, is how the MAHA influencers and media framed it as a Republican-led victory. Because the amendment was sponsored and written by Republican Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (FL) and Eli Crane, it allowed those influencers to ignore that said amendment was actually adopted almost entirely because of Democratic support. In fact, of the 280-142 vote in favor of the amendment, 207 of the “yea” votes were Democrats, and only 73 were Republicans. Meanwhile, 136 Republicans in bed with Big Ag opposed the measure.

Does that not perfectly sum up the utter confusion of the MAHA headspace, in terms of which party it is actually represents their political home? The very name of the movement was borrowed from Trump’s own slogan, but Trump’s administration is cheerleading Big Poison in a Supreme Court case to not allow Americans with cancer to continue suing herbicide manufacturers. Trump is signing executive orders that violate everything MAHA believes in, and withdrawing nominations from their favored candidates, while the supposed leader of their movement, RFK Jr., is so unwilling to disagree with Trump on a single thing that he’s afraid to take a stance even on an issue as inconsequential as daylight saving time. Meanwhile, who is backing MAHA-favored amendments in the U.S. House of Representatives? It’s members of the Democratic party, ignored by the MAHA influencers whose true, self-stated priorities are “getting women to vote red in the midterms.”

If you count yourself as MAHA, it might be time to ask whether the leaders of your movement should be people who actively seem to despise both you and your goals.

In February of 2025, back when Elon Musk was still looming over Trump’s shoulders, he attended a Conservative Political Action Conference on behalf of DOGE and yapped about the imaginary “war on comedy” (the same conference he wielded that “chainsaw for bureaucracy” around and chanted about slashing the federal government). “The left wanted to make comedy illegal,” Musk told the crowd, “You can’t make fun of anything. Comedy sucks.”

“Legalize comedy,” he declared as the audience of conservatives erupted in applause.

Fast forward to this week—Musk is long gone and preoccupied in court, and the Trumps are once again attacking late-night comedians, suggesting that a joke was responsible for the shooting at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Last Thursday, Jimmy Kimmel Live! aired a skit in which Kimmel delivered the roast-style monologue that comedians traditionally give at WHCDs of years past. In the skit, he joked that Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” After the shooting—and five days after the joke originally aired—Melania demanded ABC take action against Kimmel.

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” the First Lady wrote on Twitter. “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepen the political sickness within America.”

“Enough is enough,” she concluded. The next day, her husband ranted to Truth, agreeing with Melania’s demands. 

“Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings, made a statement on his Show that is really shocking,” Trump wrote. “A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason. I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmels despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.” In September, ABC suspended Kimmel when Trump imposed similar pressure after Kimmel joked that MAGA rushed “to score political points” from the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated the Trumps’ rants, telling the press on Monday that Kimmel’s rhetoric “led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words.” Hm… I seem to remember a different sentiment from Leavitt just a few weeks ago…After a journalist from the Wall Street Journal questioned an anecdote from Trump about diet soda killing cancer, Leavitt responded, “Get a better sense of humor.” Can she share that same advice with the president? 

Alas, the Trumps’ call to fire Kimmel confirms yet again what we already know to be true: When the “hateful rhetoric” comes from the left side of the aisle, it’s “inciting violence” and goading the assassination of the president, but when it comes from the right, it’s free speech. (and when it comes from the president, it’s just another Wednesday). 

You know what’s worse than a throwaway joke about the president being old? Being mentioned in the Epstein files 5,000 times! Just food for thought.

It has been said that human beings can distinguish and mentally catalog more than 10,000 distinct scents, and yet despite the acuity of our noses, smell itself remains our least understood and least well-explained human sense. We have long known that the walls of our nasal cavity–aka, our noses–are lined with millions of tiny olfactory receptors, nerves that emit signals to our brain. The “olfactory bulb” deep in our brain makes sense of these signals, and its physical proximity to the part of the brain that perceives memory is thought to have some connection to why the sense of smell links us to past events in our lives more dramatically than any other sense. But in terms of understanding the actual layout of these nerves, and how they process scent data, science has for years operated on an assumption that they were laid out in no particular pattern. A new study from scientists at Harvard Medical School suggest that previous assumption does not in fact pass the smell test–rather, our nasal neurons are arranged in striking patterns, and learning about those patterns could allow modern medicine to help those who have conditions that have robbed them of the sense of smell.

Studying nasal cavities in mice, the Harvard team led by neurobiology professor Sandeep (Robert) Datta of the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School employed new technology to create the first highly detailed map of how more than a thousand different types of smell receptor were organized in those mouse noses. Rather than being bunched together randomly, the researchers instead found that these receptors could be found in horizontal stripes based on each receptor type, stretching from the top of the nose to the bottom. Color coding produced the image seen above and below, which is the world’s first-ever “smell map” illustrating how these neurons are arranged.

“Our results bring order to a system that was previously thought to lack order, which changes conceptually how we think this works,” said Datta of the study, published in the scientific journal Cell.

In order to build the map, more than 5.5 million individual neurons were examined in more than 300 mice, via what frankly reads like science fiction babble, including the use of “spatial transcriptomics.” Regardless of the vocabulary, the technique allowed the researchers to identify which portions of the olfactory bulb in the brain were being stimulated by which neurons in the nose, effectively allowing scientists to directly link cause and effect for the first time to precise spots in our nasal cavity. This could have obvious applications to the medical field for those with nostril damage or other conditions that can cause a loss of the sense of smell, including the millions were affected in this way by the COVID-19 pandemic. The basic structure of the smell map is thought to be at least somewhat consistent across species, although Datta amusingly notes at one point in Harvard’s report that far more research is needed because “olfaction is super-mysterious.” I suppose it’s always nice to hear a scientist acknowledging how much more there is to learn.

Regardless, the team hopes that findings from human smell maps and other mapping of these neurons could be used in conjunction with stem cell therapies or other techniques in order to restore a sense of smell to those who have lost it. A poor sense of smell or loss of smell is linked to greatly increased chances of clinical depression, among other things, particularly in older people who may feel that they’ve been robbed of a basic facet of existence they may have always taken for granted.

“Smell has a really profound and pervasive effect on human health, so restoring it is not just for pleasure and safety but also for psychological well-being,” said Datta in Harvard’s report. “Without understanding this map, we’re doomed to fail in developing new treatments.”

Which is all to say, for the chronically nose blind, there may now be hope. Smells like optimism?