Security

Your Power: Why Billie Eilish is Right About ICE

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Billie Eilish used 30 seconds of her own earned platform to state a historical fact and object to state violence.

That’s it. She said the truth. She was right.

That’s all that happened.

And then an entire apparatus run by old white men started spinning up to attack her and make that simple act suffer a million cuts.

When Billie Eilish said “no one is illegal on stolen land” at the 2026 Grammys, the radical right-wing media machine didn’t engage with what she actually said. It started an expensive intelligence operation to make her personal life the story and distract from the crimes of ICE.

A NY Post article, for example, is textbook disinformation. It avoids telling outright lies because instead it uses deliberate reframing, selective application, and manufactured consensus.

Ricky Gervais is arguably who opened the door for attack, feeding radical right disinformation operatives. While Gervais is known for being political and frequently boasting about his celebrity pulpit to push his political agenda, he loudly announced “celebrities should shut up about politics” if they aren’t him.

The right-wing media took the Gervais opening to dispense enforcement. Understanding how this works frame by frame is essential to recognizing it in real time:

Frame How It Works
1. Permission Structure
Celebrity Silencing		 Gervais posts his 2020 Golden Globes clip telling celebrities not to make political speeches. Gateway Pundit and right-wing outlets amplify immediately. This establishes the baseline rule: famous people speaking against power is illegitimate. But Gervais himself uses every available platform for political advocacy on animal rights, atheism, and free speech. The rule only applies to causes he doesn’t care about.
2. Target Selection
Attack the White Ally		 Bad Bunny gave the more substantive speech, won Album of the Year, and is headlining the Super Bowl. But the NY Post runs Eilish as the main target because she’s a young white woman — easier to frame as naive, out of touch, and performative. Attacking Bad Bunny directly validates his point. You can’t call a Puerto Rican man ungrateful for objecting to his community being called “animals” without proving exactly what he’s describing. So they go around him.
3. Deliberate Misreading
Weaponized Literalism		 “Stolen land” is a political term describing the historical fact of colonization and the moral illegitimacy of a state built on displacement claiming authority to declare who “belongs.” The right strips this of political meaning and treats it as a literal real estate claim — as if Eilish said “I personally have no right to my house.” The actual argument: the system of sovereignty that calls human beings “illegal” is itself founded on illegitimate seizure. That’s a critique of a framework, not a deed transfer request.
4. Impossible Demand
Personal Sacrifice Test		 “Hand over your mansion then.” Takes a systemic critique and demands individual material sacrifice as proof of sincerity. The demand is absurd by design — no individual giving up a house undoes colonization. But it makes the speaker look hypocritical for not doing something nobody asked them to do. This is the tactic used against every systemic critic in history. “You criticize capitalism but you own a phone.” It’s designed to make systemic critique impossible by requiring every critic to first personally exit the system they’re critiquing.
5. Selective Application
Rules for Thee		 Senator Mike Lee says anyone making a stolen land acknowledgment should “immediately give his or her land to native Americans.” But Lee is a US Senator — he exercises sovereignty over stolen land professionally. He legislates on it. His entire authority derives from it. The standard is never applied to the people who wield actual state power over stolen land. Only to the 24-year-old singer who mentioned it. Gervais’s £14.5 million mansion never gets the photo spread treatment either.
6. Property as Disqualification
Wealth Resentment Engineering		 Four photos of Eilish’s house. Her horse paddock. Her ranch. Price tags on everything. The article inventories her wealth not to make an argument but to generate resentment. Implicit logic: if you’re wealthy, your moral claims are invalid. This frame is only activated against people whose politics the outlet opposes. Trump lives in a golden tower and claims to speak for the working class — no property photo spreads from the NY Post. Gervais is richer than Eilish — no photo spreads when he makes political statements.
7. Subject Disappearance
Story Replacement		 The article is 400+ words. “ICE” appears only in Eilish’s own quoted speech. Zero reporting on what ICE is doing. Zero mention of deportations, raids, or the communities being targeted. The article exists to make the story “rich celebrity says dumb thing.” The actual story: federal agents are terrorizing communities. People have died. Eilish becomes the controversy so ICE doesn’t have to be. The messenger replaces the message.
8. Manufactured Consensus
Coalition Coordination		 Random X user, right-wing YouTuber (Brandon Tatum), British journalist (Julia Hartley-Brewer), US Senator (Mike Lee) — all quoted making the same argument within hours. By the time a reader sees the article, “hand over your house” looks like common sense because multiple apparently independent sources say it. This is a standard rapid-response cycle: influencers generate the frame, media amplifies, elected officials legitimize. It’s not organic consensus — it’s coordinated narrative construction.
9. Gendered Diminishment
Infantilization		 “Blithering idiot.” “Sis, hand over the keys.” The language specifically diminishes along gender lines. Eilish is treated as a naive girl who doesn’t understand what she’s saying. Bad Bunny said something more politically substantive and directly connected to his own community. Nobody called him a blithering idiot. The framing infantilizes Eilish to make the dismissal feel natural and justified.
10. Manufactured Indigenous Opposition
Ventriloquism		 Fox News Digital contacts the Tongva tribe specifically about Eilish’s property, soliciting a response. Headlines run as “Native American tribe responds” and “tribe calls out” — framing it as Indigenous pushback validating the hypocrisy charge white conservatives invented. What the tribe actually said: they “value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country,” reached out to Eilish “to express our appreciation for her comments,” and partnered with the Recording Academy to author the official Land Acknowledgment at the Grammys. The tribe is being used as a prop in a gotcha game they didn’t initiate and don’t endorse.

The aggregate effect of all these disinformation frames working together is singular: make it as costly as possible for anyone to say what Eilish said.

This is an information war being waged by Trump.

And in this specific battle a full-scale Trump operation is running to shut down the voice of American freedom by swarming anyone who dares to support it.

The next celebrity who considers speaking against ICE crimes now has to calculate whether they’re willing to have their house investigated, their wealth inventoried, their intelligence questioned, and their words deliberately misrepresented by a sitting senator.

A risk calculus is the point. It’s not about winning an argument with Billie Eilish. It’s about making her look as vulnerable as possible, as attacked as possible, in order to silence the next person.

It is specifically why allies are the target. If you can intimidate the powerful white celebrities into silence, the non-white artists are being isolated and left alone, making them easier for right-wing media to dismiss as “identity politics” or “grievance culture” rather than a broad coalition objecting to state violence.

Gervais serves as Frame 1. He uses celebrity political speech to supply the self-contradicting premise that celebrities have no right to political speech. He doesn’t execute the rest of the operation himself and he doesn’t need to. He opens the door and the attack hordes of the NY Post, Gateway Pundit, Turning Point USA, and every right-wing influencer walk through his gap. His political “don’t be political” clip is the permission structure. Everything else is enforcement.

Now look hard again at what’s totally absent. In all of the coverage about the Gervais post, the NY Post article, the influencer pile-on, the senator’s tweet… not one word engages with the substance of what any Grammy winner actually said.

Not one word about ICE.

Got ICE?

Not one word about deportation.

Not one word about the people being called animals and publicly executed.

The silence on the substance, and the silence forced on those who speak the truth, is the entire strategy.

It’s why “Melania” isn’t really a movie at all, it’s a denial of service attack on the film industry to prevent anyone from speaking the truth again.

Food, Security

Florida Weaponized Candy for DeSantis’ Wife to Become Governor

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Florida dropped a disinformation bomb from their “Healthy Florida First” platform, which says eating six Jolly Ranchers in a year could poison your child.

It’s total bullshit.

Look, I’m not going to defend candy. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand the stuff. I haven’t touched a piece in decades and I think the industry is nuts.

But reading this Florida report that a single box of Nerds exceeds the “safe annual arsenic exposure” for a kid by roughly 20 times, throws more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

This is radical political campaign literature thinly dressed in an evil lab coat. Two and a half Snickers bars per year is the line between safety and cancer?

GTFO. Anyone reprinting or spreading this stuff needs to know what’s actually going on here.

As a disinformation historian, allow me to explain this has nothing to do with candy and everything to do with political extremists undermining elections.

The Pitch

On January 26, the Florida Department of Health released a two-page PDF through ExposingFoodToxins.com that claims 28 of 46 candy products contained arsenic “at elevated levels.”

Governor Ron DeSantis with his First Lady Casey DeSantis, flanked by the discredited Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, held a press conference at The Villages. Why there? It’s Florida’s largest retirement community and one of its most politically steeped Republican strongholds. They announced fraud to an audience that would never challenge the obviousness of it.

The document was curated for maximum viral impact by placing product photos alongside scary red numbers, consumption limits so low they’re absurd, and the word “arsenic” on repeat. Arsenic. Arsenic. Arsenic.

It does not include any methodology, there’s no peer review, it has no source data, no laboratory identification, no confidence intervals, or sample sizes per product.

Come on people.

None of the basic scientific documentation that would allow independent verification is in the release because none of it is real. Florida’s Department of Health was asked for clarification by multiple sources and so far there has been no update.

The Fraud

They tested for the wrong thing.

This lab used EPA Method 6010D, which measures total arsenic. That means they looked at organic and inorganic combined, despite organic arsenic being relatively harmless and found widely in food.

Inorganic arsenic is the dangerous kind. Without speciation testing, all the numbers are scientifically meaningless for assessing health risk.

Florida of course knows this. Every toxicologist of course knows this. Here’s what was pumped into a retirement community to juice political activism:

  • Fabricated benchmarks: The “safe” annual consumption limits don’t correspond to any federal regulatory standard or peer-reviewed threshold for candy. The FDA has no arsenic action level for confectionery. Florida invented its own, didn’t explain the derivation, and didn’t subject it to review. When you control the benchmark, you control the alarm.
  • FDA data contradicts them: The FDA released its Total Diet Study Interface on January 27 — one day after Florida’s press conference — providing public access to decades of food testing data. The FDA’s arsenic findings for confectionery are “significantly lower” than what Florida reported. Either the FDA’s multi-decade, peer-reviewed surveillance program is wrong, or a two-page PDF from Tallahassee is wrong. Florida hasn’t addressed the discrepancy.
  • Propaganda-based consumption limits: Four pieces of Laffy Taffy per year. 2.4 Kit Kat pieces per year. These numbers don’t track with any toxicological framework in use anywhere. They weren’t meant to.

Who Eats This Shit Up

Casey DeSantis.

She presented the findings. Her husband is building a 2026 gubernatorial campaign under her name because he termed out. He’s been positioning her as his “successor” for over a year, telling audiences that she would “do better than me”, using his political committee to clear the field.

This is simply campaign infrastructure branded “Healthy Florida First”, a $5 million state-funded program to spoil elections. This is the disinformation campaign to fabricate a platform for Casey DeSantis, generate statewide media coverage with cooked-up photos of her literally taking candy away from babies.

The URL is ExposingFoodToxins.com, not floridahealth.gov. This is radical-right political branding.

DeSantis admitted it herself: the initiative is setup like how KKK “poison whisper” networks worked under “America First” of the early 1900s. She said she’s fueling “the federal MAHA movement by working as force multipliers” and announced plans to lead “a coalition of states” in political campaigns masked as food testing. She’s building an extremist national politician profile, adjacent to a “health” program.

Florida is falling in line with RFK Jr.’s directive to the FDA to do fake “investigations” and put on a show about it. Florida’s “independent” testing is coordinated with federal political operations on a timeline that coincides with the DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign launch.

COVID Crank Ladapo

The scientific credibility of the candy report, let alone the whole Florida political campaign, falls on Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

You may remember Ladapo recommended men aged 18-39 avoid mRNA COVID vaccines in 2022. Yeah. That guy. He ran an internal Florida DOH analysis and told people not to get a vaccine for COVID.

Why?

Public records requests revealed that he personally had tampered with the findings by deleting conclusions that showed no significant risk. He added language suggesting the vaccines were dangerous. The file was literally labeled “Dr. L’s Edits.” Five successive drafts show the systematic removal of every sensitivity analysis that failed to find a statistically significant relationship between vaccines and cardiac mortality.

Imagine having a cartoonish villain for Surgeon General. Then imagine that villain announcing a candidate for governor who will save the children from dangerous… candy.

A University of Florida College of Medicine committee called Ladapo’s work “seriously flawed.” Researchers from Johns Hopkins and UF concluded the alterations were politically motivated. Yeah, you think?

An internal complaint accused Ladapo of scientific fraud. The FDA and CDC jointly rebuked him for “incorrect, misleading and harmful” use of the VAERS database. His former supervisor at UCLA told Florida not to hire him, saying he relies on opinions over evidence. The Orlando Sentinel editorial board called him a “COVID crank” affiliated with America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization whose members include a physician who attributes illness to sex with demons in dreams.

And yet here we are talking about him again. He attended the DeSantis political press conference to thank them for having “the vision” to test candy for risks, and promised “there’s plenty of dirt, unfortunately, to uncover.”

A scientist describes findings. A political operative, a DeSantis crank, promises dirt on candy.

And Then Nothing Happened

ZOMG. Arsenic. Arsenic. Arsenic. Babies eating poison.

And then?

No recalls issued. No enforcement actions. No emergency orders, injunctions, mandatory testing requirements, or referrals to the FDA.

The FDA Total Diet Study found arsenic was not detected in the majority (57%) of food samples, and when it was found in confectionery, it was at levels far below what Florida reported. When Florida suddenly claims Jolly Ranchers clock in at 540 ppb, that goes up against decades of peer review that say… nope.

If these “health” geniuses really just discovered a box of Nerds delivers 20 times the safe annual arsenic dose to a child, everyone would pull the fire alarm already. We wouldn’t be sucking on a poison dinner mint while scanning a colorful PDF for a “meet my wife” stump speech at The Villages.

The alarm is the product. It’s to generate demand for fire trucks and emergency support where there’s no fire.

Casey DeSantis announced the initiative is expanding to “other products marketed for children” already, because “save the children” is a right-wing radical disinformation gold mine. She is setting up a production schedule.

The Real Harm is DeSantis

Food safety in the United States is genuinely shit. The FDA’s framework for heavy metals in food is slow, underfunded, and subject to industry capture. Arsenic in food is a concern, particularly for children, particularly in rice-based products where the science is well established.

This is what military intelligence troops know as a grain of truth that can be weaponized to radicalize voters and dismantle democracy.

Florida’s stunt makes the actual health problems harder to fix, while making elections easier to fix.

When a state health department publishes methodologically indefensible claims using fabricated benchmarks, it hands the industry legitimate ammunition to dismiss every future concern as a “scare tactic.” The National Confectioners Association is already using Florida’s report to characterize all heavy metals concerns as political theater.

Florida didn’t expose food toxins. Florida gave the food industry a shield to dismiss concerns, which in reality means the food industry is incentivized behind closed doors to fund the campaign. Once in office the fake reports can flip to “all safe” because they were lies to begin with.

Meanwhile, the FDA’s Closer to Zero initiative has been actually doing the slow, unglamorous, peer-reviewed work of establishing defensible action levels for arsenic in children’s food. Real science will be drowned out by the lies spread at a press conference in a retirement community.

The candy industry doesn’t need defending. I hate candy.

Science is real and needs defending. The idea that state health departments should produce honest research rather than such bullshit campaign materials is apparently now a necessary position to re-establish.

Security

Florida Nazi Politician Jake Lang Arrested in Minnesota

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Jake Lang is known most for his Nazi salutes, anti-semitic campaigning, and being pardoned by Trump after violently assaulting the U.S. Capitol to overthrow democracy.

Jake Lang stands outside a Jewish political group’s office and yells antisemitic slogans while he throws a Hitler salute. Source: Twitter Screenshot by Ford Fischer

His rap sheet now extends to an incident where he traveled to Minnesota to attack and censor the speech of people there he disagrees with.

In a video Lang posted to X Thursday, Feb. 5, he is seen kicking over the [State Capitol] sculpture…. In the accompanying text, Lang wrote he was arrested. The incident took place around 2:30 p.m. that day. […] The Minnesota State Patrol states Lang is a resident of Lake Worth, Florida, which is consistent with paperwork Lang filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Florida.

The sculpture he destroyed was created by military veterans in a veteran-led anti-authoritarianism organization.

The fact that this January 6 insurrectionist traveled from his home in Florida to Minnesota specifically to physically attack installations and censor speech, rises to the level of domestic terrorism — not merely censorship but a pattern of assaults and political intimidation targeting the First Amendment rights that veterans fought to defend.

Weeks before this attack on combat veterans’ rights, Lang had threatened to burn a Quran on the steps of Minneapolis City Hall. In other words he escalated rapidly from protected extremist hate speech to hateful acts of criminal destruction of others’ protected speech. Similarly he had fraudulently claimed to be a patriot, while attacking the actual patriots.

Presumably his escalating self-promoted acts of obvious Nazism, enabled by the Trump pardon and JD Vance endorsements, are the new face of “GOP” campaigns for political office. An operational pipeline. This is exactly what pardoning violent insurrectionists was meant to produce: domestic terrorists who treat violent vandalism and Nazism as campaign strategy.

According to prosecutors, Lang, wearing a gas mask and wielding a baseball bat, struck officers whilst shouting taunts such as “This is our house, we paid for this f****** building.” […] Lang was arrested and spent four years in federal prison…[where] he continued political campaigning…. He said: “They don’t want the interviews happening so they’ll throw you in solitary and then what we do the second I get in the solitary is we have a call to action go out on like Gateway Pundit…thousands of people call and inundate the jail….” …the former January 6 arrestee said he was in touch with the president’s team, commenting: “We have a lot of great connections into Team Trump…people that have been his former attorneys, advisors, now people who are working inside his department of justice…it’s more just giving them information then they do with it what they want.”

History, Security

Trump Injected Nixon’s Attack Dog to Destroy the National Archives

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James Byron, president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, is now performing the functions of Archivist of the United States.

Let that sink in.

Byron was injected when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 300-day tenure as acting archivist silently expired on February 4, 2026 under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Byron’s previous organization was a disinformation spigot that spent decades attacking archives, fighting against accurate portrayal of Watergate. The Nixon Foundation used its radical activist money to prevent a Nixon Library exhibit that depicted the scandal as it happened. Byron sums up Nixon like this:

…inspirational — he never gave up… anything that increases interest in President Nixon is a good thing.

Anything?

People serving the “foundation” side of presidential libraries are not involved with archival content for a reason. That reason is NARA’s mandate to preserve and protect historical records. Byron is thus the opposite mandate, to destroy records.

He is not Senate-confirmed. He was not nominated. There is no nominee. By design. It has been a year and the enemy of American archives is in control of them.

Byron has no graduate degree, no archival training, no scholarly publications, and no experience working with primary sources in a professional capacity. His only authored work is a lightweight gift shop souvenir guide with a foreword by Nixon’s daughters and a blurb from Newt Gingrich.

His formative professional experience was in marketing and fundraising for an organization whose explicit purpose was rehabilitating a disgraced president’s reputation, a job he began at 14 and never left. His mentor, Hugh Hewitt, is a radical right-wing talk radio host.

One of Byron’s first personnel decisions was firing the respected historian whom NARA had installed as the Nixon Library’s first federal director specifically to impose professional standards on an institution that had operated as a family-controlled shrine. Byron couldn’t handle the truth and pushed out Dr. Timothy Naftali.

In October 2025, Byron unveiled a permanent National Archives exhibit called “The American Story” featuring what NARA described as AI document slop, the curatorial equivalent of letting algorithms hallucinate the historical record.

This is not a person who has been trained to evaluate evidence, assess provenance, or understand the ethical obligations of institutional stewardship. This is a marketing intern who has been trained by radical activists to shape fundraising narratives for audiences. He now shapes which national records survive.

How Trump Dictated It

In February 2025, Trump fired Archivist Colleen Shogan. Federal law required Deputy Archivist William Bosanko, a career civil servant, to assume the role. Byron, newly installed as “Senior Advisor to the Acting Archivist,” gave Bosanko a choice: resign or be fired. Bosanko resigned. The legal succession was overridden by a political appointee with no statutory authority to do it.

Trump then named Rubio, already destroying State Department and USAID, as acting archivist. The appointment was never officially announced. Rubio’s portrait appeared on NARA’s website two weeks later. Staff were not informed because they didn’t matter and many would be fired.

On February 4, 2026, Rubio’s Vacancies Act clock expired. Trump designated Byron to perform the duties of archivist. Staff were again not informed, because they matter even less and many will be fired. The portraits came down silently. A NARA spokesperson confirmed the change to Federal News Network only when asked.

The Rubio Devastation

The acting head of the National Archives, as the person responsible for enforcing federal records preservation, was simultaneously a participant in the Signal thread organized by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz to discuss Yemen airstrikes.

Waltz enabled auto-deletion of messages. The person who reasonably should know that officials were destroying federal records was one of the officials destroying federal records.

During Rubio’s tenure, House Democrats documented the “rushed disposal” of USAID records, violating law. Rubio was also acting head of USAID. He oversaw the destruction of records at one agency while he was serving as the head of the agency responsible for preventing the destruction of records.

This is the men of Nixon trying to do what Nixon wanted.

American Oversight sued Rubio and other officials for violating federal records laws through Signal use. The lawsuit is ongoing.

What Has Happened to NARA

The FY2026 budget request cuts NARA by nearly $60 million, a 10% reduction, and eliminates 136 positions. The Electronic Records Initiative, NARA’s system for managing digital federal records, takes a specific funding cut so it can’t keep records. The Office of Innovation, which ran NARA’s online catalog and digital access programs, receives zero funding. Its 50 staff are eliminated.

NARA already had approximately 150 employees pushed out since January 2025 to reduce its ability to function. Senior legal staff with records management expertise have left or retired. According to a current employee, the impact has been “horrendous,” with “bare bones” processing, reference, and records management teams.

Experienced legal staff of the Archives have left or retired, leading to little oversight of federal records management requirements.

By design. By the men of Nixon.

NARA’s budget has been essentially flat in real dollars for thirty years. At current funding, it would take over 600 years to fulfill pending declassification requests at just two of fifteen presidential libraries. A single FOIA request at the George W. Bush Library takes twelve years. The new budget cuts target the infrastructure for electronic records specifically, because it’s the format in which evidence of current government activity exists.

Trump’s Destructive Pattern

Rubio’s toxic role at NARA is not isolated, it’s one of many examples.

OMB Director Russ Vought also serves as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency the administration is trying to shut down. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is acting IRS commissioner. Frank Bisignano, head of the Social Security Administration, holds an invented “chief executive officer” role at the IRS overseeing daily operations. Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling heads the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a small agency the administration tried to eliminate before courts blocked its closure.

Federal News Network reported officials “holding several top jobs.”

This is the systematic placement of loyalists atop agencies to be neutralized or shut down, by using the Vacancies Act as the legal vehicle.

Holding multiple jobs is the Trump signal that none of them matter anymore, all of them are being devalued and collapsed.

What Next

The permanent archivist position is becoming a joke. The names floated include people who hate the archives the most. Hugh Hewitt, the radio host who told Trump on air that his “problems in Florida at Mar-a-Lago started because the Archivist complained to the DOJ” and suggested appointing someone to ensure “we don’t have to do this again” is top of the list. Also mentioned: John Solomon, a far-right reporter who advanced baseless conspiracy theories about former Presidents.

Jason Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, has stated the obvious: a confirmed archivist is imperative to ensure White House records are properly transferred into NARA custody at the end of this term, “and the sooner the better.”

There is no indication that such a nomination is possible when the men of Nixon are back in power.

Nixon’s presidency ended because he couldn’t destroy the tapes. The 18½-minute gap required physically erasing a recording in a building full of people who knew it existed. The modern version is ensuring the records never get created, never get preserved, or never get funded for retrieval. Worse, it’s ensuring propaganda replaces reality.

The man from the organization that spent fifty years trying to corrupt what just the Nixon archive said now controls all of them.

The Nixon Foundation appointed this 28-year-old to be their CEO after more than a decade of spreading disinformation, which began for him in 2007 as a 14-year-old marketing intern

The foxes already ate the chickens and it may be too late to save the eggs.