Quarantine this insanity

Keep Trump Inc. OUT of the transparency debate

They always land on their feet: After losing the War of Austrian Succession, as well as a massive swath of the French New World empire to Spain and England in the Seven Years War, King Louis XV gets a makeover in the Louvre — hail Jupiter, Roman God of Sky and Thunder!

You know how sometimes, when you need to work with some obnoxious muckety-muck you find thoroughly repulsive, you pull your punches? How you don’t suck up, exactly, but you employ niceties in order to keep the communication lines open? Well, recent events have triggered me back to 2009, when I was working for a daily newspaper and marbling out a UFO blog called De Void. The icky guy I wanted to interview was Larry Klayman.

No one born this century will get the reference, but Klayman was a litigious crackpot who dedicated his life to suing everybody, everybody from Judicial Watch, the group he founded to harass the libs, to his very own mama. He rated a bunch of headlines in the Nineties for suing the Clinton administration 18 times, and he famously represented Bill’s extramarital hookups. He’s sued all the other usual suspects as well, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Elena Kagan. He told DHS to deport Obama to Africa: “He has no legitimacy to be president, and he must be tried, convicted, and removed from our shores before he destroys everything the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us.”

Yep. Anyhow, in 2009, Klayman began making noise about the federal UFO coverup. His queries to three-letter agencies for intel about The Great Taboo were getting blocked, so he flashed the Blue Book card. Since the Air Force had concluded in 1969 that UFOs posed no national security threat, Klayman argued the denials of his FOIAs on national security grounds were fraudulent.

All sizzle, no steak

Given the paucity of UFO news before 12/17, I desperately needed copy, and Klayman was as good as any. While we played phone tag, I wrote about his latest target and soft-peddled his loathsome arc. I might’ve even used a little perfume to describe him as a maverick. It worked. The guy called back to discuss the game plan. He said he was done with sending FOIAs to military intelligence.

“We’re going straight into a court of law because they’re in violation,” Klayman vowed. He couldn’t wait to collect affidavits from government employees who “shouldn’t have a problem with this if it isn’t a national security issue as they claim.” He hadn’t decided where to file, but the shoe would drop soon. “The media loves a good story,” Klayman said. And “most (judges) are egocentric, they don’t make a lot of money and they like to get their names in the news.”

I kept waiting for the next press release on the lawsuit. I waited. And waited. I left unreturned messages for updates that never materialized. Five years of silence later, there was no reason to keep the kid gloves on. I unleashed my wrath in a headline above a De Void blog that nobody read: “Radar tracks on a gasbag.”

Some people mellow with age, but giraffes never change their splotches. Last I heard, Klayman had his law license suspended by the Florida Supreme Court in 2025, and the defamation suit he’d filed against Bill Maher for suggesting Laura Loomer was having a wang-dang-doodle with Trump got tossed by a federal judge in April.

So why did this even come up?

Science in exile

Last week, one of the true champions of transparency followed rhetorical precedent in an attempt to get the attention of the Oval Office. Garry Nolan, the acclaimed Stanford School of Medicine pathologist appointed to the ad hoc White House UAP Advisory Council in June, made a personal video appeal to the soggy remains of the 47th president. We all know the formula by heart now – open with praise, throw in a proper salutation (“sir”), appeal to his genius and high expectations for his place at the summit of the pantheon of Great Men, then let him know he or his “vision” is getting screwed financially at the hands of the Deep State. Nolan delivered, and wrapped it all up this way: “History will remember those who have the courage to act.”

Yes – Trump is easily the most sadistic, mendacious and incompetent sack of meat to debase the Resolute Desk. His crimes against this nation, our allies and the world couldn’t be redeemed if he declassified and paraded Bob Lazar’s S-4 “Sports Model” flying saucer at whatever Freedom 250 diversion comes next. And yet, Nolan struck the exact same tone I or anyone else so motivated would’ve made were we in his shoes. That’s because, right now, in America, there is simply no other mode of communicating with a narcoleptic octogenarian who posts Napoleonic memes of himself festooned with more medals than generals Patton and MacArthur.

Imagine the bitter pill Nolan had to swallow in order to pull it off. Owner of more than 50 patents, 350-plus peer-reviewed journal articles to his credit, a pioneer in everything from cancer to Ebola research, Nolan like all of us has had to endure the tragedy of Trump’s chainsaw approach to science for 19 months now. In May, immediately after the commander-in-chief fired all 22 members of the National Science Foundation advisory board without explanation, the Brennan Center for Justice issued its damage assessment.

Cutting or freezing $3.1 billion in previously approved funding from the NSF and the National Institutes of Health budgets, with the announced but as-yet-unrealized goal of terminating $44 billion in research grants for a single year, Trump’s systematic dismantling of institutional knowledge has no modern antecedents. The Brennan Center detailed how Washington’s self-immolation had purged 95,000 federal employees from science agencies by the end of 2025, prompted two-thirds of research scientists to warn promising students against pursuing academic careers in America, and sparked an exodus of brainpower to China and Europe, at a projected cost of $1 trillion to the economy at large over the next decade.

And the vision thing . . .

Therefore, barely two months into his role with Trump’s UAP Advisory Council, with no meaningful UFO/UAP data to evaluate, the Stanford innovator followed his conscience and made a pitch for the public good. “I want to applaud the White House and president Trump for opening the door to scientific progress in this area,” Nolan began in his video. “It’s truly a momentous turning point in history.”

Without naming names, Nolan told 47 there were “barriers as created by the bureaucratic state” and “individuals who seek to obfuscate . . . oversight from Congress and even the president. You are paying for something that you are not being told about.” Would that be enough to stoke Trump’s ire? Without criticizing the inadequacy of the regime’s proposed waiver for present or former federal employees who step forward with inside information, Nolan advocated for “a plan that fulfills President Trump’s vision for transparency.”

More specifically, he added, “I’m appealing to President Trump, sir, please bring back David Grusch and other competent whistleblowers into government service at a level where they can support you, and give them the necessary authority to bring this matter to whatever conclusion the evidence deserves as analyzed by science and the people.”

Will it work? Hopefully not. After more than 40 years of journalistically chasing this white rabbit, I never thought I’d ever say lock the door. But urging this White House to reveal the truth about UFOs is beyond naive, and it needs to stop.

Things you can count on

We may never know exactly which whim or impulse prompted Trump to order USG agencies to release whatever UFO/UAP files they’ve been sitting on. What we do know is, his alleged interest in The Great Taboo is performative. This man has no vision for transparency on UFOs or anything else. Trump is a dangerous criminal. He will steal whatever’s not nailed down. And if he can’t have it, he will destroy it.

Fortunately, at least for now, he is incapable of grasping the historical, technological, cultural, spiritual, and economic magnitude of the phenomena. But his entourage is packed with self-dealing capos, some of whom are cunning enough to smell the money. And in the event the buried treasure gets pingbacks, Trump’s castratos are plenty capable of convincing him to loot the whole joint and haul it all off to Mar-a-Lago.

Between Congress, conscionable civil servants, the media, private capital and maybe even AI, there are ways around Trump Inc. But any path forward on disclosure must cut the Kremlin’s most valuable asset out of the loop. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine factions within the gatekeepers’ ranks deciding to slow-walk relatively innocuous documents and videos into the public eye in order to placate Goldfinger’s superficial edicts while keeping him from tearing the whole house down. We can be fairly certain the military is holding up its end — Trump doesn’t give a damn about them or their families.

Bottom line, there aren’t many things in life you can count on, but here are a few:

Lucy will always snatch the football at the last second, and Charlie Brown will always wind up on his back. When he gets his law license back, Larry Klayman will keep suing people he doesn’t like. And, as he’s been doing to workers and stakeholders since demolishing the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue in 1980, Trump will always fleece the suckers who take him at his word. And we keep letting him get away with it.