The Exhaustion Strategy: When the CDC Becomes the Target
- john raymond
- Aug 28
- 2 min read
The pace of targeted reprisals under this administration has reached a level where even the most diligent observer can hardly keep up...
I wrote yesterday about one wave of effective firings and forced resignations, only to wake up today to find that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already been taken down, and with her several senior officials who refused to collaborate in the betrayal of science.
The speed of events is itself part of the strategy. Evil is flooding the field so that no one has the capacity to track each outrage, much less resist them all. Exhaustion is the intended condition.
The removal of CDC Director Susan Monarez after only weeks in office, followed by the coordinated resignations of the agency’s top medical and scientific leaders, is not an accident of timing. It is asymmetric cruelty in its purest form.
The target is not simply an individual, nor even an agency, but the very dignity of Americans who depend on functioning public institutions. The CDC is the guardian of public health, but also of public trust. To break it is to tell citizens that their lives and health no longer matter, that what protects them from disease is expendable if it inconveniences the regime.
The exhaustion strategy here is twofold. First, bury the opposition in a daily avalanche of attacks and reprisals, making it impossible to track the full extent of the damage. Second, destroy the institutional backbones that give Americans dignity—the agencies that ensure water is clean, food is safe, medicine is effective, and that public health is guided by science, not ideology.
This is asymmetric warfare against the nation’s confidence in its own governance, designed to demoralize citizens into silence and despair.
And yet, here I am trying to keep up. Each day I try to document, to analyze, to hold on to the thread of truth in the flood of lies. The very fact that I cannot keep pace testifies to the method: evil multiplies faster than truth can catalog it.
But that does not absolve us from trying. If we give up, the record will vanish, and the destruction will proceed without witness.
The targeting of the CDC director marks a particularly cruel escalation. Health is the most intimate and universal of public goods. To strike at its leadership is to strike at the body of the nation itself. It is to declare that even the institutions charged with keeping people healthy and alive must bend to political loyalty or be broken.
That is the logic of authoritarianism in its rawest form.
This is not normal politics. This is a deliberate strategy of asymmetric cruelty, applied with escalating speed, meant to exhaust, overwhelm, and ultimately destroy the democratic capacity to resist.
The only defense is clarity—naming each act as it happens, no matter how overwhelming the pace, and refusing to let exhaustion silence the truth.
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