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Garrett Shanley is due to graduate from the University of Florida next month, and if your news org is looking for a dynamite reporter, you’d better reach out ASAP.
You might remember Shanley’s blockbuster last August about Ben Sasse, the former senator who served as university president for just seventeen months, and left because he needed to take care of his ailing wife. That was true enough, but as Shanley would discover, Sasse’s taxpayer-subsidized extravagance during his short tenure was jaw-dropping: he ballooned his office’s travel budget to twenty times his predecessor’s, while hiring his old Senate aides for university jobs that paid around $400,000 and that allowed them to remain in the DC area.
That story was tough enough, but this week Shanley had an encore. He dug into the underperformance of the state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis lured from California by adding a coveted tenured professorship at the UF medical school to the offer. But as Shanley discovered, Dr. Ladapo doesn’t do much for the university. He has given a few lectures but hasn’t taught an actual course. He has little research to show for his time, focusing mostly on his memoir about what he saw as his pandemic-era heroics. And he’s facing “multiple integrity complaints” for allegedly altering a study about COVID vaccines.
Many of the cuts first announced by Elon Musk’s DOGE crew hit foreign-aid programs or Washington-based bureaucrats. So Trump’s base of supporters might have thought they’d be spared.
But those initial trims don’t get you close to the promised $2 trillion in savings, so DOGE now is slashing costs in red America. That could include as many as thirty-four leases for the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the agency that oversees working conditions and provides assistance to sick miners—many of them in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “Without the federal inspections, coal operations will just run rampant,” a former mine prosecutor said in this excellent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation. “There won’t be any accountability.” That could mean there will be more victims like Randall Dickerson, forty-nine: “I wake up in the morning, I’m coughing my brains out. I have to use an inhaler and an oxygen machine and I’m not even 50.”
In a face-off between a great white shark and a killer whale, who’s more likely to win?
If you’re me, you’ll pick the shark.
But then again, I’d never heard of the killer-whale duo known as “Port” and “Starboard” who have been prowling the South African coast for at least a decade.
As the Washington Post’s Jonathan Edwards tells it, it isn’t just that the whales win, it’s what they do in achieving their victories. By the time the whales had finished their attacks, the sharks’ “hearts, stomachs and other major organs were still intact—with one exception. In each case, the liver had been removed.”
Said one marine biologist: “They can handle a white shark and just shuck it like a mussel almost—just tear it open and slide its liver out and consume it and discard the rest.”
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein was just bustin’ with pride over his March 28 story: “New Rubio order (leaked to me) directs the State Department to spy on student visa holders and applicants [on] social media,” he posted on Bluesky and X. He got the buzz that he wanted with thousands of reposts, and presumably a traffic boost to his $100-a-year site.
If you had a sense of déjà lu, it’s probably because you’d already read this piece, titled “State Dept. demands ‘enhanced’ social media vetting of student visa applicants,” by Marisa Kabas, another independent journalist. Her story ran a full two days before Klippenstein’s. (And Kabas’s version was more authoritative and better-written.)
I reached out to Klippenstein via email, Signal, and social media, but he didn’t respond. Maybe at some point he will (leak his response to me).
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