Secretary Kennedy Goes After the NYT's Biased Reporting

 

Secretary Kennedy

@SecKennedy

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and

@nytimes

. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story? You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements. I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff. In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility. I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times. Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention. Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months). His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats. Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg

@SherylNYT

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Jun 7

NEW: Major posts are vacant. Waves of scientists are gone. Ebola looms. How RFK Jr. manages HHS: “If the C.E.O. lacked deep expertise in the company’s business and the leaders of its most important divisions were missing, investors would revolt."

https://x.com/seckennedy/status/2064855154428698725

The Threat of Big Insurance

 

Earlier this month, the California-based organization Consumer Watchdog uncovered an incredible scandal involving rideshare company Uber, which we covered on the most recent episode of my podcast Organized Money. The company pleaded to the California legislature last year that its insurance costs had spiked so much that the state needed to decrease required payouts on its mandated uninsured motorist coverage. “They literally said 45 cents out of every dollar is going to insurance,” Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, told me.

It turned out that these excessive insurance payments were going to a Hawaii-based company called Aleka that is run by Uber executives. Aleka was raising rates on Uber higher than other insurers, but that money just got transferred into a reserve bank account under Uber’s control. These excess reserves can be put toward Uber expansion plans while remaining untaxed, unlike company profits. Then this alleged cost center was used to convince the legislature to ease off on its insurance payout requirements.

Making the situation even crazier, Uber executives were given financial bonuses for getting that specific piece of legislation, SB 371, passed into law. Executives earning the bonuses included Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer and Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law, as well as Ramona Prieto, head of public policy for the western region and the actual executive who claimed that Uber was paying 45 cents out of every dollar for insurance, while eliding the fact that Uber was paying this money to itself.

Prieto’s fiancé, Juan Rodriguez, is a partner with Bearstar Strategies, the mega-consultant in Sacramento that flipped from Eric Swalwell to Xavier Becerra’s campaign for governor when Swalwell’s campaign imploded. Uber spent millions of dollars on Becerra’s behalf in his successful primary run.

Uber also has a ballot measure that has qualified for the November ballot intended to fend off lawsuits brought by rideshare passengers hurt in accidents. It’s polling poorly relative to a competing measure that would increase passenger protections. But Uber is funneling tens of millions of dollars into the campaign, which is being run by … Bearstar Strategies and Rodriguez, Prieto’s fiancé. Rodriguez and Bearstar have already made $9.2 million off the ballot measure, according to the report.

It’s a wild story, but it’s also kind of an old-school one. This isn’t about leveraging Uber’s technology or its ability to surveil riders and drivers. It’s just an insurance scheme, one of the oldest plays in the books.

STORIES OF INSURANCE COMPANIES with off-books operations or oversized reserves go back to the Massachusetts life insurance scandal of the early 20th century, exposed by a young lawyer named Louis Brandeis. He found that insurance companies were selling junk insurance to working-class laborers and taking 40 cents out of every dollar for executive salaries and shareholder dividends. Meanwhile, just 1 out of every 12 policies actually paid out. Eventually, Brandeis’s efforts dismantled this insurance slush fund, and it sparked his interest in broader political reform against big business.

Insurance generates massive amounts of money in the time period between receiving premiums and paying out claims. This is known as float, and it can be invested, manipulated, and concealed in ways that benefit insurers (and in this case, a self-insured transportation company). Delaying those claim payouts or reducing government mandates for claims increases the float, and therefore the profits.

Insurance is massively profitable. The empire of Warren Buffett would not exist if he didn’t learn early in his career about the power of insurance float. That excess cash was used to create Berkshire Hathaway and build it into the ultimate conglomerate.

Because of the regulated nature of the business, insurance companies have considerable interest in government. Any legislative burdens they can break apart directly impacts their bottom line, to the extent that with Uber, executive performance pay was literally tied to successful lobbying. This is why the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a coalition of state regulators, is so heavily lobbied, and not surprisingly, so weak.

When it comes to health insurance in particular, the importance of establishing influence over government is magnified, simply because of the prodigious size of that business and how much of the money comes from government programs. Who is in the decision-making positions inside government really matters to insurance companies, and they don’t like to leave that to chance.

ANOTHER NEW REPORT, this one from the Center for Health & Democracy Education Fund, looks at health insurance industry donations through nine corporate PACs since 1999, finding $120 million in contributions to state and federal candidates and political parties. This year, the report’s authors expect donations to break the annual record of $17 million set back in 2022. And this doesn’t count dark money routed through PACs that do not have to disclose their spending.

The money is being tracked in real time at a website called the Health Insurance Influence Tracker. The authors of that tracker and the report, Rachel Madley and Zena Wolf, connect these outlays directly to outcomes in policies affecting the industry. “We talk in the report about Frank Pallone, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who is a co-sponsor of Medicare for All but takes a lot of money from the health insurance lobby,” Madley said. “He was chair and controlled the calendar from 2019 to 2023, but there was only one hearing on Medicare for All, and he never held a markup.”

Another fight concerns Medicare Advantage, the privatization of the single-payer system for older Americans. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) estimates that private Medicare Advantage companies will effectively steal $76 billion from the federal government this year, in the form of “upcoding,” the process of making their patients look sicker than they are to inflate reimbursements. Congress is well aware of these overpayments, yet it’s done nothing about it, and the flow of corporate PAC donations is likely a major reason. Bipartisan bills to reform the practices can’t get a vote.

For years, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Tim Scott (R-SC) submitted a bipartisan letter extolling Medicare Advantage for giving insurance access to millions of seniors. The report notes that Cortez Masto has taken $297,000 from the health insurance industry throughout her career, while Scott has taken $314,000.

Some of the biggest recipients of health insurance industry cash in Congress are party leaders, who control the voting calendar. They can bottle up reforms, even when they have majority support, for years. “When they enter leadership they get a huge rise in donations,” Madley said, citing House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who received just two PAC contributions from the industry prior to winning his leadership election in 2023, and $150,000 in PAC money since then. The same dynamic is apparent for the new House Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY; $88,000 from industry PACs) and Katherine Clark (D-MA; over $100,000).

These leaders have been able to hold off reforms of such impediments to treatment as prior authorization, which has been used excessively in Medicare Advantage and other insurance policies to block access to care. Currently, a prior authorization reform bill, the Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act, has a supermajority of co-sponsors in both chambers, yet cannot get a vote.

The report tracks a spike in spending on state politics, particularly in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, including Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida. Private insurance companies manage Medicaid programs for states, and expanded coverage would be quite lucrative. Yet none of these states have expanded Medicaid, suggesting limits to the power of insurance industry cash. The obstacle in this case, of course, is that conservatives recoil at the idea of spending any public money to cover poor people through Medicaid. But this inability of the industry to fully dictate outcomes is true in other contexts as well.

The health insurance industry has effectively merged with pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen that drive drug prices higher. Yet Ohio and Kentucky successfully threw out PBMs from their state Medicaid programs; Arkansas and Tennessee banned PBMs from owning retail pharmacies (something targeted at CVS, which owns Aetna and its own PBM Caremark); and Congress after years of work passed a PBM reform law that bans so-called “spread pricing,” where PBMs charge different rates to health plans and pharmacies and pocket the difference. Several other state reforms have passed as well.

In other words, campaign largesse does not have to be destiny. “The health care crises that we are in are so devastating, and crushing so many people, that a lot of people are realizing that this system has to change and can change,” Madley said. “It’s not going to be easy but we’re starting to move in the right direction.”

https://prospect.org/2026/06/11/threat-of-big-insurance-lobbying-congress-donations/

US downs Iranian drones after attempted attack on ships in Hormuz - Fox News

 

US forces shot down two Iranian one-way attack drones on Thursday night after Tehran “attempted to strike commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz,” Fox News reported citing a senior US defense official.

“Traffic flow through the Strait continues,” the official added.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/202606062776

Everybody protesting about everything down in Mexico

by Silvio Canto, Jr. 

I'm not a soccer, or “fútbol” fan, but Mexico did a great job hosting the 1970 and 1986 World Cup.  This year, Mexico is one of three North American countries hosting games.

As they tell me, Brazil’s Pelé put on quite an exhibition back in 1970.  He was at his prime, and no one played better than him.  Watch his magic goal.  In 1986, Argentina’s Diego Maradona scored that magical (or controversial) goal.  The net result is that visitors and the locals were thrilled with how Mexico handled the whole thing; a great host is the bottom line.

Let me add another personal note.  In 1982, or during the Cup in Spain, I was living and working in Mexico City.  The place was happy and loud around the games.  In our office, everybody was watching the game.  The restaurants were full of people eating and watching the games.  It was a great atmosphere, even for someone like me who does not understand why they settle championships with penalty kicks.

That was then and this is 2026.  Mexico City is one chaotic mess where everybody wants to protest about something.  Let’s check this out:

Mexico will host matches at three venues, namely the iconic Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Estadio Akron in Guadalajara, and Estadio BBVA in Monterrey, and a total of 13 matches throughout the tournament.

As Mexico is set to host the opening match of the FIFA World Cup 2026 against South Africa at Estadio Azteca, the country has been grappling with a massive labour protest, which is causing significant logistical disruptions, forcing the authorities to implement strict travel corridors and heightening security concerns for international fans arriving for the highly anticipated tournament opener.

The massive protests were organised by the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), which has long campaigned for the reversal of educational reforms they argue marginalise the public sector staff. The educators are staging widespread protests across the country, demanding an increase in their salaries, 100% hike in wages to combat inflation, and a complete overhaul of the current pension system.

 

The demonstrators strategically opted to protest just days before the marquee event to maximise their leverage, knowing that the influx of international media, global football fans, and high-profile dignitaries would force the Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo-led government to prioritise a swift resolution to the unrest.

To be fair, a lot of these protests are motivated by TV exposure.  The demonstrators know that everybody has an iPhone or X account, and getting attention has never been easier.  The protests go beyond labor issues.  The population is angry about violence, the economy, corruption, etc.  I have not heard of an anti-Trump protest, but that’s probably part of the show too.  What would a left-wing protest be without bashing the U.S. president anyway?

How bad will it get?  Time will tell, but the protestors were warned by local authorities that they can’t get close to the stadium. However, a Mexican friend told me that these protesters want fame and attention; they will probably get it, and make life miserable for the 90% that just want to enjoy the games.

Where is “la presidenta”?  She won’t attend the games, or so we hear.  By the way, Mexico will open the tournament against South Africa in the fabled Estadio Azteca where Brazil and Argentina won the aforementioned titles.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/06/everybody_protesting_about_everything_down_in_mexico.html

Where is Anthony Fauci?

 

The short answer is that he is now doing what many former government ideologues do in order to reinvent themselves: they go into academia.  

 

Fauci is at Georgetown University as the “Distinguished University Professor” in the School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy.  

 

Like many other partisans who take such posts at university centers and institutes, this unfortunately involves preaching his ideology to susceptible young adults in college, medical school, and public policy.

I say “susceptible” because universities trade on perceived authority, prestige and titles. And because universities also hold out rewards and punishments — grades, degrees, financial aid, recommendations and careers — the students are therefore conditioned to lower any skepticism, and accept direction and ideology, and in the process, adapt their beliefs and behavior.

Ironically, this is exactly what Fauci’s COVID program was ultimately about.  

Whatever your views are about what was called a pandemic; and whatever your opinion may be about vaccines, it is important to realize that Fauci’s original white paper published at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) had nothing to do per se with medicine, or vaccines, viruses, pandemics or health.  His white paper — almost entirely forgotten or never even seen — asserts the necessity of controlling mass human behavior.

That indeed was the essence of the COVID program, with its new vocabulary of “lockdowns,” ‘shelter in place,” “social distancing,” “staying safe” and more, including testing, tracing, tracking and reporting.

In addition, it was used as a way to suppress speech, as former White House advisor Dr. Scott Atlas, has repeatedly, and courageously, reminded the public. Indeed, Atlas was recently at the University of Chicago Law school speaking at a conference organized by student political conservatives, and his speech is worth reading. 

It is only natural that Fauci is now at a university, as they were not only at the forefront of COVID lockdown hysteria and mass vaccination, but profiteered from it, including from Biden's nearly $2 Trillion COVID "relief aid." They still will not face contrary scientific evidence, or admit mistakes or wrongdoing, and are indeed ready to roll out their pandemic protocols again, if directed by global institutions, or as part of larger partisan cooperation. 

I won’t burden readers with the readily available and extensive public domain information that traces Fauci’s career, and his work in the Obama administration on virus “gain of function” research, and what its implications are that further indict that administration.

What is worth pointing out, however, included at the end of this essay*, is Fauci's astonishing admission concerning the ideological objectives of the virus program: “radically change” human behavior.  This includes how people live, work, move and travel so as not to “perturb the environment.”  

Fauci’s vision is of a radically less populated planet, with human movement highly curtailed in order to reduce environmental impact (the uses of “remote learning” and of course mail-in ballots, were early applications, as is the now de rigueur use of “Zoom” meetings.  If you’ve been arguing live in a courtroom recently, you’ll notice that you’re largely alone, and that nearly everyone else still attends by remote video. What this does to law is troubling, and also partly explains the assumed logic of AI: you don't need people).

Fauci’s paper argues not only for levels of population that must be reduced, but the entire industrial infrastructure of global economics must be altered.  It is a classic utopian delusion based on an equally detached, and deceptive, ideology. As Karl Mannheim discussed in his original 1946 Ideology and Utopia, ideologies are mental fictions whose function is to veil the true nature of a given society. They originate unconsciously in the minds of those who seek to stabilize a social order. Utopias are wish dreams that inspire the collective action of opposition groups which aim at the entire transformation of society.

This larger conceptual and policy motivation—long articulated by the UN, the NAS, which argues that the “affluent” are eroding the Earth’s resources; and progressive foundations like the UK Wellcome Trust that funds “demographic surveillance”--stems centrally from “Green” ideology, including deindustrialization, carbon neutrality, and so-called “anarcho-primitivism,” which regards wholesale modification to nothing less than the “infrastructures of human existence" as Fauci puts it in his NIH white paper.  This is apparently to regain a previous, pre-modern state of nature, thought to be in equilibrium. This objective of course, is accomplished, as economist Thomas Sowell describes, by society's intellectuals, who know better than you do. 

As the progressive Left ramps up its virus fear mongering again (in the short-term, to claw back federal research funding), and desperately seeks to regain political office and political control, Fauci’s original ideological policy paper is worth keeping in mind as a political risk profoundly greater than any virus. Who and what should otherwise be pursued in law, readers likely appreciate. Any potential resolution, however, could be forestalled, or foreclosed, by negative outcomes in the midterms.

Matthew G. Andersson is a former aerospace CEO and law and policy author.  He has been featured in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the National Academies of Science where he discussed the ramifications of Covid policy and air travel. He has testified before the U.S. Senate, and is a graduate of the University of Chicago.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/06/where_is_anthony_fauci.html

ActBlue guilty of fraudulent act?

 by James Zumwalt

For a non-profit organization raising money, honesty lies in truthfully revealing its focus. Such honesty does not compensate, however, for subsequent dishonesty about how those funds are raised.

From its name, the fundraising focus of ActBlue was readily apparent. The first syllable signified its political activism while the second signified it was acting on behalf of the Democrat party, associated with the color blue.

Started in 2004 to facilitate funding for progressive causes, ActBlue claimed to be “the complete campaign kit” and that “thousands of Democratic campaigns and organizations use ActBlue to fundraise, organize, and win. Join them with a platform you can trust.” But it was that same trust that became the subject of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on June 10.

As is often the wont of Democrats seeking to undermine the credibility of a hearing called by Republicans to investigate potential wrongdoing by left-leaning entities, they condemned this one too as being politically motivated. The hearing had called ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones as a witness, who initially indicated she would be willing to testify.

However, committee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) quickly dispelled the myth of political motivation by Republicans. He pointed out the hearing was being held due to an allegation made by a former White House counsel for President Joe Biden and Covington & Burling’s legal counsel to ActBlue—Dana Remus. The communication between Remus and Wallace-Jones (apparently obtained by the committee) triggered the hearing based on a suggestion the latter may have willfully and knowingly misled the Congress of the United States.

There was no basis in fact for Democrats to accuse Republicans of political motivation. It appears that all justification for the hearing was provided independently by ActBlue’s own documentation.

In a 2023 letter to Congress, Wallace-Jones claimed ActBlue conducted “‘multilayered’ screenings of donations—a practice that supposedly “helped ‘root out’ those from overseas.” She also claimed donations from foreign mailing addresses were only accepted if a U.S. passport number was provided.

It was ActBlue’s Covington & Burling law firm that determined “some of the steps [Wallace-Jones] had described were not always followed.” As reported by the New York Times, citing a law firm memo to ActBlue, donors using Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo were not asked to provide passport data.

The law firm forewarned there was “a substantial risk that some of the funds received were impermissible contributions from foreign nationals” and, as such, “This presents a substantial risk for ActBlue.” It also warned this could trigger a potential criminal investigation should prosecutors determine that ActBlue deliberately tried to hide the truth about not blocking foreign donations.

Covington advised ActBlue to “explicitly correct the record” with Congress lest it “be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections.” It was not until 2025 that ActBlue finally did so, sending a new letter to Congress reporting it “has recently implemented additional restrictions that will automatically reject contributions with indicators that they come from abroad, including contributions made through third-party payment processors.”

Accordingly, however, the hearing was no Republican witch hunt; it was a hearing clearly motivated as a result of communications involving non-Republican sources. Unfortunately for Jordan, every question he then put to Wallace-Jones met with the same non-response. Upon the advice of legal counsel—which she now suddenly accepted—she asserted her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself.

Jordan’s first question noted the acknowledgement by ActBlue’s board chairman that the organization had “accepted up to 38 million contributions in 2024 that had the signs of foreign origin.” Following up with the query “How much fraud is too much fraud,” Jordan received the same reply from Wallace-Jones.

Despite this, Jordan continued with a litany of additional questions including: “How many foreign contributions did ActBlue accept?...How much money did ActBlue accept from Russia?...Why did your entire legal team quit—your in-house legal team?...Did your legal team quit because of reduced fraud standards?” Realizing his effort was futile and will mandate a different approach, Jordan concluded with “We won’t keep you here all day but…just one more, Did you weaken fraud standards to help Democrats?”—a question triggering the same witness response.

The day she testified—or did not testify—before the committee, Wallace-Jones published an opinion piece in the Washington Post. She wrote that she intended to plead the Fifth as “Silence in response to bad-faith action is not retreat — it is a bedrock American right.” Unshared by her op-ed was that it is also a right exercised by those guilty of a crime but obviously not wishing to acknowledge the same by answering questions that would prove such if answered truthfully.

Based on ActBlue communications that include evidence provided by the organization’s own legal counsel and board chairman, the hearing Republicans called is not a “bad-faith action”—it is one demanded in order to determine the truth about whether ActBlue willfully and knowingly lied to Congress by accepting illegal contributions.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/06/actblue_guilty_of_fraudulent_act.html

Protests erupt outside Mexico City stadium on World Cup opening day

 Social tensions exploded outside Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca soccer stadium on Thursday, as violent clashes between demonstrators and police marred the opening of the World Cup.

Protesters smashed vehicle windows and brawled with law enforcement just as Mexico netted the tournament’s first goal, according to France24.

The unrest follows weeks of demonstrations that have already jeopardized plans to host World Cup fan events in the Zócalo, the city’s central square. 

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A police officer gives instructions through a megaphone from atop a barricade as Mexican soccer fans queue to enter the FIFA Fan Fest ahead of the opening match of the FIFA World Cup 2026 between Mexico and South Africa, in Mexico City.REUTERS

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Police officers stand guard during a protest on the day of the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City,.REUTERS

While teachers have spearheaded the push for improved working conditions for weeks, other critics who have joined in more recently directly accuse the government of prioritizing international visitors over the immediate needs of local citizens.

The friction has put President Claudia Sheinbaum in a difficult spot, balancing a domestic security crises against high-stakes trade negotiations with the US set for July.

“Mexico wants to project an image to the world that doesn’t exactly square with reality,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political analyst at the Mexican Center for Research and Economic Education. 

“The World Cup is putting the president in a vulnerable situation … The government is under extreme pressure.”

Wednesday night, over 1,000 people marched toward Estadio Azteca carrying candles and photographs of their missing loved ones and the teachers’ union blocked roads. 

Sheinbaum denies that the World Cup is spurring unrest.

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Police restrain demonstrators.AP Photo/Alejandro Cegarra

The president said before the tournament that “if for some reason the Zócalo cannot be used for the opening, there are 18 venues where people can watch it free of charge.”

“Everything is under control,” she added.

Local officials told demonstrators that they could only advance until the “last mile” outside of the stadium.

“We just want to be seen,” said Adriana Lozano, 56, from Los Cabos, who has searched for her missing son for nine years. 

“What we are looking for is peace,” she continued. 

“We want this to end because so many young people are disappearing.”

Expensive ticket prices have made attendance at the World Cup unaffordable for many Mexicans, like Dr. Jose Luis Muñoz, who remains excited for the game, but will support the Mexican national team from his living room instead of the stadium. 

“The prices are sky-high,”  Muñoz said.

“Many people aren’t going to be able to go unless they’re foreigners with a lot of money.” 

“It feels very discriminatory.”

https://nypost.com/2026/06/11/world-news/protesters-clash-police-outside-estadio-azteca-mexico-city-during-world-cup/