We spoke to experts about Kennedy’s claims about sperm and fertility — including the author of the study he cited.
This story was originally reported by Mariel Padilla and Jennifer Gerson of The 19th. Meet Mariel and Jennifer and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has, historically, been very public about his concerns about what is plaguing the nation’s well-being. His long, complicated history with vaccines is well-documented. So is his long-standing spat with fluoride. Unlike President Donald Trump, he is not a fan of fast food, but he is a big believer in animal protein and raw milk.
And this week, he spoke about another issue vexing him: men’s sperm count.
“The fertility crisis for women began in 2007; for men in 1970. Men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today. This is an existential crisis for our country. We had a series of presidents who were trying to discourage childbirth and motherhood in this country. We now have a president who is trying to encourage it,” Kennedy said at a White House event on maternal health Monday.
While many experts agree that sperm counts are likely lower than they were decades ago, it is less clear how much influence a declining sperm count has on the country’s falling birth rate.
What the science says
Dr. Hagai Levine, the lead author the study Kennedy referenced and chairman of Israel’s association of public health physicians, said he agrees with Kennedy’s characterization that there is a “crisis.”
“I truly believe based on the data that there is a male fertility crisis globally and in the U.S.,” said Levine, who is also an environmental epidemiologist and public health physician at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It’s manifested in a biological measurement, which is remarkable. It’s not a soft measurement; it’s something that you can count very accurately.”
Levine said his 2022 study, a systematic review of 223 studies, found a 50 percent decline in both sperm concentration and total sperm count between 1973 and 2018 across North America, Europe and Australia.
“We expected to find a subtle decrease over time, not a drastic decrease,” Dr. Scott Lundy, the study’s lead author and Urology Program Director at Cleveland Clinic, said in a blog post. “I think finding nothing at all was a little bit surprising, and it certainly does not mean that we can ignore this issue or not study this further. But in this case, I think there’s at least some evidence to suggest that we can be somewhat reassured.”
Without speaking to any specific studies, Levine said that different methodologies could yield contradictory results. In a meta-analysis, he emphasized the importance of comparing only studies with similar laboratory methods.
“It’s good that in science there are others who make other claims and try to look at other things,” Levine said. “But when I looked at the literature, I was not convinced that there is no decline. I plan to update our study; maybe there is new data. And I hope that I will find that the decline stopped or even reversed.”
Levine said recent studies show that a lower sperm count is associated with higher morbidity — meaning a low sperm count can be a marker of poor health in general. He said more research needs to be done to identify the cause of declining sperm counts, but research on animals has shown that certain chemicals disrupt the endocrine system. Obesity, lack of physical activity, smoking, binge drinking, certain drugs, occupational exposures and climate change, specifically rising temperatures, also likely impact sperm health. Levine said his research findings are a clear sign that something is wrong with men’s health on a global level.
But how much does a declining sperm count impact the falling birth rate in the United States? Levine said it’s not clear, but he suspects that social factors play a bigger role.
“We know that, for example, women’s education is very related to the number of children in a family,” Levine said. “So I would assume that social demographic changes are the main reason for the shifting trends in fertility, meaning the number of children per woman of childbearing age in the United States and in many other countries.”
Dr. Michael Eisenberg, a professor of urology at Stanford University, said reports of declining sperm counts have been circulated in urologist circles for decades. While more controversial in the 1990s and 2000s, Eisenberg said there’s been increasing evidence from larger and more comprehensive papers published in recent years.
“There is still some controversy in the field, but I think generally the consensus is — and I certainly believe — that sperm counts are declining,” Eisenberg said.
Most of the studies on sperm count are meta-analyses, which are studies of studies. There is no systematic tracking of sperm count or national effort to monitor semen health in the United States.
“When people think about fertility, I think that unfortunately the male role in that is somewhat undervalued and underappreciated,” Eisenberg said. “I think bringing a lot more attention to it is important. Women have regular cycles, so they have some sense of their fertility potential, whereas men don’t have that feedback.”
Administration messaging
It’s not the first time that Kennedy has talked about sperm count. In December, he mentioned it during a HHS announcement about coverage for in vitro fertilization (IVF). In April 2025 he made similar remarks to Fox News’ Jesse Watters, asserting that “an American teenager today has less testosterone than a 68-year old American man.”
Kennedy’s language echoes messaging from Trump himself; Trump has called himself the “fertilization president” and the “father of IVF.” At the maternal health care event Monday, he referred to himself as the “father of fertility.” Other members of the administration have also expressed concerns about fertility.
“Let me speak a little bit about the reality that 1 in 3 Americans are under-babied,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said at the Monday White House event “What does under-babied mean? That means that you either don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have.”
The administration has long courted adherents to pronatalism, or the belief that a declining birth rate is the primary problem of our times — and that everyone should do their part to reverse course by having as many children as possible. (Sometime Trump ally and former head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Elon Musk, is an avowed pronatalist and is believed to have fathered at least 13 children by at least four different women.)
And baked into pronatalism are traditional gender roles and an insistence that women’s ultimate work is having babies.
Kennedy’s comments draw a direct connection between paying attention to the sexual function of men with the need of women to birth babies.
What women want
Karen Guzzo, PhD, is a professor of sociology and the director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina; she’s an expert on fertility preferences and fertility behaviors.
Guzzo said that Kennedy’s comments reflect an insistence on finding a physiological reason for population decline, despite there being no evidence for that.
The reality is that most Americans who want to have children want to have two or three children.
“The reason that people aren’t having kids or are delaying having kids isn’t because they’re physically unable. It’s because they don’t feel like they’re able to have kids at that point in their life, given their social and economic circumstances,” she said.
Any increase in infertility is largely due to more people delaying having children.
“People aren’t just deciding at 18, ‘Oh I don’t even want to have kids until I’m 38.’ It’s usually because they want to get to a point in their life where they’re like, ‘All right — now I have enough money. Now I have a stable partnership. Now I feel that I can provide a good life for children,’” she said.
What research has shown, in other words, is that what really delays someone from having children are economic and social conditions. Guzzo said some of the key factors that allow people to feel the necessary security are affordable childcare, strong unions and union jobs, affordable higher education, and accessible healthcare — including maternal and reproductive healthcare.
The focus on sperm count? A “clear misdirection,” she said.
“Young women are like, ‘Yeah I’m not asking for the most sensitive guy in the world. I just want a guy that thinks that I should not die in childbirth and that I can also have a job,’” Guzzo said. “Real men are secure enough in their masculinity that they can, in fact, change diapers and stay home with their children and be active parents.”
Look what he’s up to now! (Gotta laugh. Well, I had to, for a minute or so; they have kids, also I worry for Mrs. Walters, but they’re likely all safer now. Interestingly, he is who filed, not she. Of course, poor behavior of prominent husbands is how no-fault divorce came about to begin with.)
Former Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters is one of the holiest men in all the land. He worked tirelessly for many years to use the power of the state to convert children to Christianity, without care or regard to how “unconstitutional” that was. A Bible in every classroom! Every wall straight up papered with the Ten Commandments! State funding for Catholic charter schools! Forcing kids to watch videos of him praying to Donald Trump! Sure, many of his initiatives failed, but he did ultimately succeed in one thing: spending over $100,000 in taxpayer funds to pay PR firms to promote his “personal brand” and secure over 400 media appearances for him.
To be fair, he was also really good at sending and showing porn to his colleagues.
And now he is about to be very good at being alone.
Last Friday, Ryan Walters filed a petition to divorce Katie Walters, his wife of 15 years and mother to his four children. In the filing, Walters’s attorney cited “a state of complete and irreconcilable incompatibility” as the reason for the divorce, claiming that this “destroyed the aims of the marriage of the parties and rendered its continuation impossible.”
In other words, a no-fault divorce.
If you haven’t been paying too much attention to the worst people in the world, you may not be aware of the Right’s hysteria over “no-fault divorce” these last few years, which they claim has just ruined everything by allowing women to leave their shitty husbands without needing to prove abuse or adultery.
Sure, it’s also significantly decreased suicide rates in married women, decreased domestic violence across the board and led to far fewer men being fed arsenic-laced ham sandwiches by wives with no other recourse for getting out of a bad marriage. But it’s really inconvenienced men who would like to force the women they feel they own to stay married to them, as God intended.
While all states now allow for no fault divorces, Oklahoma allows for both no fault and fault divorce, which means he had the option to have a divorce of which his Christian Nationalist pals might have approved, but he decided against. One of the benefits, we might note, of no-fault divorce, is that people don’t end up having their dirty laundry made public in court records. Does Walters have something to hide? Did he send porn to too many people? Were there not enough Ten Commandment posters in their home, causing him to lapse and break the sixth?
Of course, it doesn’t actually seem as though Christian Nationalists are that mad at no-fault divorce when it’s the man who files, so perhaps that is the difference here? They haven’t been too clear about how they want this New Gilead to work beyond just, you know, women giving up all of their rights so that they can be happy.
After all, they seem to be pretty okay with all of Trump’s divorces in pursuit of younger women (though perhaps, in their world, it is a more valid reason than escaping domestic violence).
An Essential Shot: Vitamin K shots, which help the blood to clot, are one of three key interventions for newborns, along with an antibiotic eye ointment and the hepatitis B vaccine.
Increasing Rejections: The government doesn’t track vitamin K rejections, but hospitals have seen a rise in parents opting out of the shots for their newborns, often driven by unfounded fears.
Troubling Data: Hundreds of children die each year from spontaneous bleeding in the brain, a common result of vitamin K deficiency, suggesting that many related deaths go unreported.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.
Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.
Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy’s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.
None of it was enough.
At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.
Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.
Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families’ fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.
Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough.
The vitamin K shot is one of the three main interventions, along with the hepatitis B vaccine and an antibiotic ointment in the eyes, that newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital. Leading American institutions and the World Health Organization recommend that newborns get the shot.
In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been highly effective at fighting a virus that can lead to lifelong infections and liver cancer. A federal judge in March temporarily blocked the revised childhood vaccination schedule that included that recommendation. Some families are also rejecting the eye ointment.
Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.
“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.
“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”
An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions but in an email blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden for the rise in parents rejecting vitamin K shots. “Vitamin K at birth,” the spokesperson added, “remains the standard of care.”
Meanwhile, families continue to be inundated with advice from self-proclaimed experts using medical terms incorrectly and misunderstanding science to convince parents that getting the shot could put their newborns at risk of grave harm.
Nearly a century’s worth of research and medical advancements shows the opposite to be true.
Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot, research shows, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, where in many cases oxygen can’t reach their brains and blood pools around their skulls. Perhaps most alarming is that, according to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.
Determining precisely how many babies have died or suffered severe brain damage because of a lack of vitamin K is difficult. State and federal agencies don’t track data around vitamin K injection refusal or subsequent bleeding, which impedes their ability to quantify and track outcomes, including death.
The number of deaths directly attributed to vitamin K deficiency bleeding appears to be small — fewer than a dozen annually — but has started to climb in recent years, according to death certificate data from federal and state agencies.
But those numbers capture only a fraction of deaths, which often are classified only by other, more immediate causes, such as bleeding in the brain. In 2024, for example, more than 700 newborns died from spontaneous bleeding in their brains, which could have been complicated by liver disease or prematurity. Still, six medical specialists and one official at the CDC said a meaningful portion of those deaths likely were caused by vitamin K deficiency. Many more babies survive the bleeding but suffer massive brain bleeds and lasting injuries.
“A lot of the providers don’t have this on their radar,” said Dr. Jaspreet Loyal, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale Medicine. “The lack of data is almost acting like a reassurance for families that this risk is worth taking.”
Although it is difficult to quantify deaths attributable to vitamin K deficiency, there is clearly a large jump in the number of parents declining the vitamin K shot. Some hospitals have seen refusal rates more than double. A national study of more than 5 million births, published in December, found that the rate of U.S. babies not receiving vitamin K at birth topped 5% in 2024 — up 77% from 2017.
More Newborns Are Not Getting Vitamin K Shots
More than 5% of newborns in the U.S. did not receive vitamin K shots in 2024.
Source: “Trends in Vitamin K Administration Among Infants,” JAMA
The success of the shot has been so remarkable that it nearly eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding altogether. The science was settled decades ago.
“This was not something we even bothered to spend much educational effort on,” said Dr. Allison Henry, the director of newborn medicine service at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s in Los Angeles, “because there was this simple, safe intervention.”
A cluster of cases 13 years ago was one of the first major signs that something was amiss.
Four babies were rushed to a Nashville, Tennessee, children’s hospital after they suddenly fell ill months apart. Stunned, doctors ran tests that revealed severe bleeding and reached out to Dr. Robert Sidonio Jr., their blood disorder specialist. They learned that the parents had declined vitamin K shots for the babies, each of them between 6 and 15 weeks old.
Once they realized that, the medical team moved quickly to treat them, injecting them with vitamin K and hoping it wasn’t too late. Much to the relief of doctors, they all survived. Only one infant had developmental delays.
The parents explained that they had declined the shot for a number of reasons: a concern, based on long-debunked claims, that the shot could cause leukemia; a belief that the shot wasn’t necessary; and a desire to reduce their baby’s exposure to “toxins.”
The CDC and the state health department opened an investigation and later published a report that found that when the parents declined the shot, their awareness about the risk of bleeding was “incomplete or absent.”
Dr. Anna Morad, a pediatrician at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, said she had witnessed a gradual rise in families refusing vitamin K leading up to the hospitalizations.
She and her colleagues went into the Nashville community to speak at birthing centers and advise families about the benefits of vitamin K. One mother who had refused the shot for her newborn partnered with Morad and described how she came to realize that the shot can save lives.
More than a dozen pediatricians interviewed by ProPublica said they strongly recommend all three of the typical newborn interventions but agreed that the vitamin K shot is the most vital.
“I’m picking vitamin K every day,” Morad said. “Absolutely.”
With time, the number of families who turned down the shot dropped. As the need for the community outreach waned, Morad lost touch with the mother she had teamed up with and refocused her energy on directing the newborn nursery at Vanderbilt Health.
“I’ll be honest, I thought we had turned the corner,” Morad said. “Naively, I thought that would be enough.”
Dr. Anna Morad, a pediatrician at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, says the vitamin K shot is the most essential of three interventions that newborns are typically given. “I’m picking vitamin K every day. Absolutely.”Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica
All newborns lack vitamin K. No matter how much vitamin K a mother consumes, it doesn’t sufficiently pass through the placenta, and breast milk contains only small amounts. That puts babies who are exclusively breastfed at a higher risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding. Formula is fortified with vitamin K, but even with that, experts agree, babies should still get the shot.
Doctors have yet to understand why some babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot are fine while others bleed uncontrollably. But they do know that the risk increases dramatically. For babies who don’t get the shot, the risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding from a week after birth to 6 months ranges from 1 in 14,000 to 1 in 25,000 births. With the shot, the research shows, the risk drops to less than 1 in 100,000.
The role of vitamin K is so crucial that researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 for their discovery of its ability to form clots and stop bleeding in babies. The official presenting the award called the discovery the vitamin’s “greatest practical importance” and lauded it among the discoveries that have been of great benefit to humankind.
In 1961, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that all newborns in the U.S. get a shot of vitamin K. The CDC has supported newborns getting the shot as well, devoting several pages online to raising awareness around vitamin K deficiency bleeding and writing that babies may bleed “into their intestines, or into their brain, which can lead to brain damage and even death.” For decades, medical textbooks and lectures have presented the vitamin K injection as an example of a public health policy success.
After reports that vitamin K deficiency bleeding was on the rise, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy statement in 2022 to stress the shot’s safety and efficacy. The paper included talking points for pediatricians to help them respond to common misconceptions: “Vitamin K injection does not contain mercury. Vitamin K does not cause cancer. The vitamin K injection used in newborns is safe. The dose is not too high for newborns.”
“We’re a victim of our own success,” said Dr. Ivan Hand, the director of neonatology at Kings County Hospital Center in New York and the co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics statement. “Since we’ve been treating babies with vitamin K, we haven’t seen much deficiency bleeding, so people think it doesn’t exist.”
Seeing photos online of healthy babies who didn’t get the vitamin K shot and reading comments from parents who felt justified in their refusal, it’s easy to think that the risk of bleeding isn’t real, or at the very least that it’s exaggerated.
On Facebook, comments about the shot include: “Don’t do it!” “Huge lie!” and “It’s a scare tactic.” One person wrote, “Never will I ever inject my baby with poisons from big pharma.”
Families have also pointed to a 2023 episode about vitamin K shots by conservative podcaster Candace Owens, who said, “What Big Pharma is saying is that we realize that babies were born wrong. They don’t have enough vitamin K, and so we’re going to give them what they always needed. God designed us wrong.”
Owens did not respond to a request for comment.
Hidden is the agony of parents mourning the loss of their babies. Some are still in denial.
ProPublica spoke with five of those families, but none of them wanted to be identified publicly.
The obituaries, social media posts and GoFundMe pages capture the utter despair of the families, though none of them reckon with the decision not to get the vitamin K shot.
“No one could’ve prepared us for the heartbreak we faced 6 weeks after our little miracle was born,” one mother wrote. “She had a spontaneous unexplained brain bleed that led to brain death.”
“We miss his sweet smell,” another family wrote.
A third family, who made their decision after reading about vitamin K on social media and talking with their midwife, dismissed the vitamin K shot altogether. Instead, the father expressed outrage at the hospital for not delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord. He said he believed doing so would have allowed his son to be infused with vitamin K from the cord blood, a popular theory on social media. Research, however, shows that while delayed cord clamping can raise the baby’s hemoglobin levels, it does not have the same effect on vitamin K.
“I figured the hospital was already pissy with me because we didn’t vaccinate at all,” he told ProPublica. “They lost out on all the money from that.”
The family’s anger has subsided some since the baby’s death, in part because of their trust in God’s plan.
“I can sit here and be upset and sad, but this brought me closer to God,” the father said. “I just can’t wait to be with him.”
Two of the families who went on to have other children found themselves facing the same decision: Would they decline the vitamin K shot again? Both got the shot for their newborn.
Autopsy reports reviewed by ProPublica, like these two from children in Minnesota and Arizona, have notes from coroners citing vitamin K deficiency as a cause of death.Obtained and redacted for privacy by ProPublica
Morad watched as the number of families declining vitamin K climbed over the last year.
In January, she reached out to Sidonio, her former colleague who first recognized the 2013 cluster of cases there, for advice. Sidonio, now a pediatric hematologist oncologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and professor at Emory University School of Medicine, said he’s more worried than ever.
During that cluster, Sidonio recognized the need to collect data on how often parents decline the shot and what happens to those babies. But in discussions with the CDC, he said, he was told that it would be too difficult.
More than a decade later, nothing has come of it. In a recent email to ProPublica, federal officials said vitamin K deficiency bleeding has never been submitted for consideration as a notifiable condition.
“If you don’t track it, you don’t document it,” said Sidonio, frustration building in his voice. “They have to make it a reportable health condition, just like a new measles case. That’s the only way it’s going to change.”
Like him, Dr. Kristan Scott, the lead author of the national study that found a jump in the number of babies not receiving vitamin K, also landed on a need for a robust system to monitor vitamin K refusals and any subsequent consequences.
“We don’t have a clean data repository provided by public health systems or the state that would allow us to be able to track this in a more systematic fashion,” said Scott, who is a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Some doctors failed to recognize the role of vitamin K when a baby came into their emergency rooms, let alone knew how to reverse the damage from the declined shots. Many of them encountered the condition only in medical school textbooks.
Some hospitals have started to run their own numbers, but the effort is scattershot. The data is also usually kept in house, so there’s not a wider knowledge of the problem. Recognizing the urgency of the matter, officials at a handful of hospitals agreed to share their data with ProPublica.
Doctors at St. Louis-based Mercy, which runs birthing hospitals in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, began noticing an uptick in families turning down the vitamin K shot during the pandemic. Last year, 1,552 babies across all Mercy hospitals didn’t get the injection. In 2021, that number was 536.
And at Idaho’s largest hospital system, the refusal rates have gone up every year since the start of the pandemic, and in some cases have more than doubled. In 2020, 3.8% of families across St. Luke’s Health System declined the vitamin K shot for their babies. In 2025, that figure jumped to 9.8%. One hospital even reached 20% of babies not getting vitamin K shots.
At least two babies treated at St. Luke’s died within the last year from complications related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding, hospital officials confirmed. But Dr. Tom Patterson, a pediatrician who treats newborns at some St. Luke’s hospitals and is among the most vocal in warning about the climbing refusal rates, suspects there may be more.
Patterson recently pleaded with a family to allow their baby to get the shot. The father refused and shocked the doctor by going even further. He approached the nurses to complain about Patterson pushing the matter.
How We Reported This Story
As part of our reporting, ProPublica contacted 55 hospitals and birthing centers around the U.S.; interviewed more than 30 doctors; and filed nearly 90 public records requests with state and local health departments, medical examiners and other agencies. ProPublica also analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and examined hundreds of pages of medical and autopsy records.
Explanation: These people are not in danger. What is coming down from the left is just the Moon, far in the distance. Luna appears so large here because she is being photographed through a telescopic lens. What is moving is mostly the Earth, whose spin causes the Moon to slowly disappear behind Mount Teide, a volcano in the Canary Islands of Spain off the northwest coast of Africa. The people pictured are 16 kilometers away and many are facing the camera because they are watching the Sun rise behind the photographer. It is not a coincidence that a full moon sets just when the Sun rises because the Sun is always on the opposite side of the sky from a full moon. The featured video was made in 2018 during a full Milk Moon. The video is not time-lapse — this was really how fast the Moon was setting.
This was a private event held and paid for by the group for a set amount of time at the park. It is a normal occurrence at parks like this. If this had been a Christian church doing the event it would have caused no backlash and been accepted. But because it was a Muslim sponcered event with mostly clothing of this sect of the Islamic faith that also encouraged the eating of foods not normally eaten by Christians it caused a backlash of Islamophobia. Hate for people and customs different from the Christian religion practiced by white people is common in the nearly theocratic Texas. Hugs
The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
A private event at a Texas city-owned water park has been canceled following backlash and a direct threat by Gov. Greg Abbott to withhold more than $500,000 in state public safety funding.
A spokesperson for the City of Grand Prairie said Thursday the city canceled the DFW Epic Eid Celebration scheduled for June 1 at the Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark.
“After further review and in the best interest of the City of Grand Prairie, the June 1 Eid event at Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark has been canceled,” the spokesperson said.
The event at the city-owned waterpark was initially promoted with flyers describing it as “Muslims only” and included a modest dress code requiring burkinis for women, halal food, a private prayer room and rules encouraging attendees to maintain personal space and “lower the gaze.”
After backlash on social media, organizers updated promotional materials to state that “all are welcome,” provided attendees follow the modest dress code.
Abbott’s Public Safety Office shared a letter with The Christian Post that had been sent to Grand Prairie Mayor Ron Jensen warning that the “DFW Epic Eid” event “was publicly and openly advertised as discriminating based on religion” and therefore violated agreements between the city and the Public Safety Office.
The letter from Public Safety Office Executive Director Andrew Friedrichs said the event “purports to be public facing and discriminatory at the same time” and compared it to advertising for a “Whites only” event.
“All Muslims — but only Muslims — may attend,” Friedrichs wrote. “An event at a city-owned pool that was publicly and indiscriminately advertised as ‘Whites only’ would surely violate the Constitution.”
Event organizer Dr. Aminah Knight later updated the online flyer to clarify that the DFW Eid Celebration is a “privately organized and privately funded event held through a standard rental of Epic Waters, just like many other private gatherings hosted at the park.”
“At its core, this event is about creating a space where individuals and families, particularly those who value modest dress and a modest environment, can come together and enjoy a recreational setting comfortably,” Knight wrote.
Knight added that anyone “of a different faith who wants to celebrate the Eid holiday with us and adhere to the modest dress code” is welcome to attend.
A screenshot of an online flyer for a 2025 “Muslims only” event at the Epic Indoor Waterpark in Grand Prairie, Texas. | Screenshot/Facebook
A Facebook post shared by Knight in May 2025 promoting last year’s event included a flyer calling it an “exclusive Muslim-only event” and stating that the taxpayer-funded facility was “closed to the public” for “Muslims only.”
It is unclear whether the City of Grand Prairie approved the flyer or its contents. The city did not respond to CP’s request for comment by Thursday afternoon.
While the 2026 event flyer listed Knight as the organizer, a video shared on social media by Muhammad Abdullah, listed as the director of Outreach & Youth at Al-Hedayah Academy in Fort Worth, claimed he organized the event.
In a video posted Tuesday, Abdullah blamed “Islamophobia” for the public response to the now-canceled event and said, “By the way, I’m organizing that with my wife.”
CP reached out to Al-Hedayah Academy, where Abdullah is pictured as a member of the mosque’s “spiritual team,” seeking clarification Thursday on whether the mosque was involved in organizing the event.
According to Knight, more than 600 people attended the event last year, and all “lovers of modest fashion and those who are curious about Eid and what modesty at a waterpark can look like” are welcome to attend.
Owned by the city of Grand Prairie near the Dallas and Tarrant County border, Epic Waters — which has no ties to the planned Muslim-centric development formerly known as “EPIC City” — is an 80,000-square-foot waterpark with a retractable roof and the longest indoor lazy river in North Texas, according to its website.
Epic Waters opened in 2017 after voters approved a 0.25% sales tax, according to city documents. The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
Because it’s important to re-read this proclamation every year, at least on Mother’s Day. And especially so in this year of strikes and other activism to get our government back to we the people, and in comparison to the retail profits from this holiday.
Too few Americans are aware that early advocates of Mother’s Day in the United States originally envisioned it as a day of peace, to honor and support mothers who lost sons and husbands to the carnage of the Civil War.
MOTHER’S DAY PROCLAMATION Boston, 1870
“Arise, then… women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.“
~ Julia Ward Howe
May 10, 1857 The Sepoy Rebellion was triggered in Meerut, India, when native troops (known as Sepoys, which also designated a rank equivalent to private) turned on their British officers.It was the first instance of armed resistance against colonial rule. Indians constituted 96% of the 300,000-man British Army.Loading the Lee-Enfield Rifled Musket assigned to the Sepoys involved biting the end of a cartridge greased in a combination of pig fat and beef tallow. “Attack of the Mutineers,” a British illustration of the Sepoy Rebellion The former is haraam (forbidden) under Islamic law, the latter offensive to Hindus who consider the cow as aghanya (that which may not be slaughtered). When the Sepoys, including both Hindu and Muslim Indians, became aware of this, some refused to load their weapons. Mangal Pandey, a soldier in the Army shot his commander for forcing the Indian troops to use the controversial rifles. When others were charged with mutiny for refusing, Sepoys turned on their officers and released the imprisoned soldiers. The rebellion is now considered the first Indian war for independence. More on the rebellion
May 10, 1967 Army Captain Howard Levy, a physician, was imprisoned three years for refusing to train U.S. Special Forces soldiers for Vietnam. He refused an order to perform the training as he considered it a violation of his medical ethics. “The United States is wrong in being involved in the Viet Nam War. I would refuse to go to Viet Nam if ordered to do so. I don’t see why any colored soldier would go to Viet Nam: they should refuse to go to Viet Nam and if sent should refuse to fight because they are discriminated against and denied their freedom in the United States, and they are sacrificed and discriminated against in Viet Nam by being given all the hazardous duty and they are suffering the majority of casualties.” From the Supreme Court case, Parker, Warden, et al. v. Levy.
May 10, 1968 Peace talks began in Paris between the U.S. and North Vietnam with businessman, former New York governor, ambassador and cabinet secretary W. Averell Harriman representing the United States. Former Foreign Minister Xuan Thuy, heading the North Vietnamese delegation, immediately demanded cessation of U.S. bombing.
May 10, 1972 Jane Briggs Hart, the wife of Senator Philip A. Hart (D-Michigan), informed the Internal Revenue Service that she wouldn’t pay some of her taxes; instead, she deposited her quarterly estimated tax of $6,200 in a special bank account. She wrote: “I cannot contribute one more dollar toward the purchase of more bombs and bullets.” Jane Briggs Hart More about Jane Briggs Hart
May 10, 1980 A federal judge in Salt Lake City, Utah, found the U.S. government negligent for its above-ground testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada from 1951 to 1962. The land of the Nevada Test Site is scarred with craters from nuclear testing.
May 10, 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. He had won the country’s first election in which all South Africans could vote, regardless of race. Mandela had spent nearly three decades imprisoned for his part in the struggle to attain political and civil rights for black and colored citizens. This ended more than three centuries of white rule, beginning with the Dutch in 1652. Biography of Nelson Mandela South African chronology
I remember when penny candy went to nickel candy under Pres. Nixon, and applied what we learned in our school “Weekly Readers” to figure that out. Of course there were larger problems. A few years later, my dad lost his business due to general economic woe with high inflation, and I’m pretty sure everyone remembers how personal and smaller business econ went in the 80s. I don’t know why we have to repeat history, when certainly more than a few people can remember this stuff. But, here it is in a concise video. Sharing it would be awesome!
Democratic TN state Rep. Justin Jones burns a Confederate flag in the state Capitol, Thursday, May 8, 2026, video screengrab
Yesterday, the Ku Klux Klan, we mean Tennessee state Legislature, rushed through new maps to eliminate the state’s last remaining Democratic congressional seat in Congress, and racist pigfuck Governor Bill Lee signed them, because that’s what white supremacists do when Donald Trump’s partisan hack Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional for them not to hurt Black people by gutting the last remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuits are already being filed, and to be sure, Republicans don’t even understand the war they started yesterday. As we wrote, it’s useful to remember that Republicans always, 100 percent of the time, overplay their hands.
We quoted Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, who until yesterday was running in a primary against long-serving Congressman Steve Cohen to represent what was the Ninth District, in Memphis. We guess how exactly that will end up is undetermined at this exact moment, but Pearson said earlier this week at a rally that “[I]f we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one. And our message to the Republican Party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.”
Pearson, if you remember, is one of the two Black men in the Tennessee Three, back when the grand wizards of the Tennessee Lege first bent over and showed everybody their Klan-hood-shaped buttplugs, expelling the two men from the state House for taking to the House floor to try to defend their constituents against gun violence. Also for being Black men, because they didn’t expel the white woman, Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson, for being part of the same protest. (Voters of course sent the two Justinsright the fuck back to the Legislature.)
Both Justins were of course present yesterday to witness what white supremacist Tennessee Republicans really think was the Birth of a Nation. And there were many protests in the Tennessee state Capitol yesterday. Justin Jones of Nashville set a Confederate flag on fire, or at least a paper version of it.
And then he stomped that sad loser little bitch of a flag — a flag the greatest losers who ever lived died defending, and their family legacies are less valuable than dried dogshit because of it — right on out.
And what are people saying about that, and about iconic pictures photographers captured of that? “Hang it in the Louvre.”
Oh, it’s gonna be in museums and history books all right.
Rep. Jones, “Brother Jones” as he refers to himself on Instagram, posted videos and images of the already iconic moment.
The South will not rise again, until it’s paid for all its sins of racism and white supremacy.
Today, I left the Capitol Klan Rally, where my white Republican colleagues took off their white hoods and dismantled Black political power in our state. It’s shameful, it’s immoral, and it will go down in the history books alongside the legacy of George Wallace and Bull Connor.
Tennessee has shamefully become the first state to pass a new, racist congressional map following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which dismantled the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When I walked into the building it was 2026, and when I walked out it was pre-1965. This racial power grab against Black voters is purely rooted in control and elimination of their voices in our democracy. Today’s Jim Crow laws passed in our legislature spit on the graves of our Civil Rights martyrs who bled and died for the right to political power and representation.
They are dragging us backwards in history but we refuse to be moved.
I burned the Confederate flag, because the neo-Confederate caucus that assembled today will be defeated again. Their vision of the South, rooted in plantation politics and racial division will not win. Instead we must use this moment to ignite our rebellion and movement even more towards real justice and multiracial democracy. We must build towards a South that can RISE ANEW.
We will not go back!
“Burn it, young brother,” said Joy-Ann Reid in response. So say we all.
At first glance, the Yellow-breasted Chat seems to be a mishmash of many bird families: its larger size and stout bill resemble a Scarlet Tanager’s, while its skulking habits and complex vocalizations seem more like those of a thrasher or mockingbird. Taxonomically, this bird was considered an unusual wood warbler in the family Parulidae. However, in 2017, the American Ornithologists Union gave this bird its own family — Icteriidae — based on its unique physical and genetic features. It is considered to be related to the blackbirds and meadowlarks of the Western Hemisphere.
Among birders, the Yellow-breasted Chat is best-known for two features of its behavior: its habit of staying hidden at most times within the thickest vegetation available, and its loud, wild, weird song and flight display. In 1953, ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent described the Chat’s song as a “medley of strange sounds, musical and otherwise, catcalls, whistles, and various bird notes coming from points now here, now there in the bushes” — sounds which would “betray the presence of this furtive and elusive clown among birds.” The song is indeed a strange and wonderful mix of cackles, clucks, whistles, and hoots. Only males are known to sing, and they do so from deep inside the densest cover. A male chat may sometimes sound as if he’s laughing at the frustrated birders trying to locate him. (snip-MORE)
And thanks to MDavis for intro’ing this guy, who is great!
Scottie's Playtime 
