On January 28, 2026, the United States Department of Homeland Security released a short video honoring the life of Megan Bos, an Illinois woman whose death would otherwise have remained one more private tragedy in an age drowning in them. The timing was deliberate. The release came one year into the Trump administration, at a moment when immigration enforcement had ceased to be an embarrassed afterthought and was once again treated as a foundational obligation of the state. The message was not emotional. It was forensic. Megan Bos did not die because America lacks laws. She died because the state failed to enforce them when it mattered. One year into the Trump administration, the January 28 DHS report should be read not as a memorial, but as a verdict. Bos’s case involved no statutory uncertainty. The accused had been arrested, processed, and placed inside the criminal justice system. He was later released under Illinois’ SAFE-T Act, which sharply limits pretrial detention and reflects a policy judgment that custody itself should be exceptional. The release was not the result of a finding that the defendant posed no danger. It was the product of a framework that elevates release as a default. Federal authorities intervened later. By then, delay had already imposed its cost. The case illustrates a broader point often obscured in contemporary debate: non-enforcement is not a neutral condition. It is a decision. When an individual who is removable under federal law is released rather than transferred into federal custody, risk is not eliminated. It is reassigned — from institutions designed to manage it to the public, which never agreed to assume it. Megan Bos bore the consequence of that reassignment. This is the institutional role of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE is not a substitute for local policing or courts. It is the only authority with the mandate to remove non-citizens once state and local processes conclude. In a fragmented system — where police arrest, courts adjudicate, and legislatures set policy-ICE functions as the final integrating mechanism. When that mechanism is resisted or disabled, risk does not disappear. It circulates. Recent events in Minnesota offer a clear illustration of how this dynamic plays out. Over the winter, federal agents expanded targeted enforcement operations in Minneapolis and the surrounding Twin Cities region, prompting protests, political backlash, and public clashes between local officials and federal authorities. The controversy focused largely on optics and tactics. Far less attention was paid to the profiles of those actually being arrested. According to disclosures by DHS and contemporaneous reporting, individuals taken into federal custody during these operations included convicted perpetrators of aggravated sexual crimes involving minors, individuals with criminal sexual conduct convictions, offenders convicted of drug trafficking, and others with documented histories of domestic violence and assault. In one case, ICE arrested an individual subject to a federal warrant for the sale and distribution of amphetamines, alongside prior convictions that had not prevented his continued residence in the community. These were not first-time offenders, nor individuals awaiting adjudication. They were people who had already passed through local systems and been released — sometimes repeatedly — despite criminal histories already established. The Minnesota arrests did not create new risks. They revealed accumulated ones. This pattern is not confined to one state. During the Biden administration, independent and federal estimates converged on a population of roughly 10 to 11 million people living in the United States without legal status, many released pending proceedings, many never located again, and many existing outside any continuous monitoring framework. At that scale, assurances that “most are law-abiding” lose analytical relevance. Risk in large systems does not operate on percentages. It operates on absolute numbers. A system that loses track of millions is not exercising compassion; it is forfeiting visibility. No serious regulator would tolerate comparable opacity in aviation safety, financial markets, or public health. Yet in immigration enforcement, diminished situational awareness has often been defended as a moral achievement. ICE exists because scale changes responsibility. Local courts lack authority to remove non-citizens. States lack jurisdiction. Cities lack both capacity and mandate. Interior enforcement at this magnitude is not an ideological preference. It is a functional requirement of governance. When that requirement is treated as optional, the consequences follow predictably. Where enforcement is obstructed, failure follows. In December 2025, DHS publicly rebuked Fairfax County, Virginia, after local officials declined to honor an ICE detainer request and released a criminal illegal alien who committed murder the following day. DHS stated plainly that the killing was preventable. Similar failures have been documented elsewhere. In Minnesota and beyond, ICE arrests have included convicted child rapists and killers who had been living freely because local jurisdictions declined to cooperate with federal custody transfers. These were not clerical oversights. They were policy choices, repeated, defended, and predictable in outcome. Nationwide enforcement operations during the same period identified what DHS described as the “worst of the worst”: murderers, violent gang members, and child sex offenders apprehended only after slipping through local enforcement gaps. In one case, an Egyptian national accused of killing an elderly woman with an improvised incendiary device at a public gathering was detained only after cooperation had already collapsed. Even where ideology recedes, reality intrudes. In late 2025, federal prosecutors detailed the case of a twice-deported illegal immigrant who unlawfully re-entered the United States and later caused a fatal car crash that killed two teenagers. Removal orders had been issued. The law was settled. Enforcement was not sustained. The numbers tell the same story. In 2025, ICE conducted nearly 600,000 administrative arrests and carried out more than 600,000 removals, the highest one-year totals on record. According to DHS, roughly 70 percent of those arrested had prior criminal convictions or pending charges. This was not indiscriminate enforcement. It was triage. Where enforcement was obstructed, risk accumulated. Between 2022 and early 2025, more than 25,000 ICE detainers were declined nationwide. California accounted for more than half. Boston acknowledged ignoring every detainer request it received in 2025. These refusals did not eliminate risk. They displaced it. The final illusion is that enforcement is punitive rather than preventative. Yet as removals increased, DHS also recorded nearly two million voluntary departures — individuals choosing to leave rather than test a system that had resumed functioning. Deterrence rarely announces itself. It is measured in crimes that do not occur, victims who never come into being, funerals that are never held. Megan Bos’s death followed a familiar sequence: arrest, release, delay, irreversible harm. Every step complied with prevailing policy norms. Together, they proved fatal. ICE intervened too late not because it was unnecessary, but because it had been prevented from acting sooner. The January 28 DHS report should therefore be read not merely as a memorial, but as a verdict. A state that declines to enforce its own laws does not become more humane. It becomes less responsible. ICE exists because modern societies cannot govern through moral outsourcing alone. When enforcement is treated as discretionary, the costs do not vanish. They accumulate-until someone else pays them. Megan Bos was not an anomaly. She was the invoice. READ MORE from Kevin Cohen: Drug Gangs, Child Gunmen and Antisemitic Abuse — Welcome to Marseille After the Illegal Immigrant Surge Britain’s Boat Crisis Comes Into Focus

Much has been made of how a federal judge last week struck down the Education Department’s guidance advising schools to dismantle their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives or risk losing federal funding. Supporters of DEI have seized on the ruling as proof that their cause is resilient. It began when institutions abandoned intellectual diversity, punished dissent, and elevated ideology over education. But the larger picture tells a different story. Whatever its legal status, DEI has already lost cultural legitimacy — on campus, among students, and even within the academic left itself. Consider the academic climate at one elite institution, which was captured in an interview of a highly-regarded professor, Jill Lepore. She has taught at Harvard since 2003 and no one would identify her as a conservative. She was asked by the New York Times if woke culture was a “real problem” and not just a “problem that the right has managed to … weaponize.” She replied that, “it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about…. I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.” When even a Harvard professor complains about the left creating a hostile environment on campus, and alienating a lot of Americans, you know you’re on the wrong side of history. Consider one such problem: the lack of ideological diversity among college professors. A self-reported survey of the political affiliation of more than 1,100 tenure track faculty in 2020 revealed a sharp preference for Democrats. Among sociologists, 86 percent identified as Democrats; less than 2 percent identified as Republicans. The numbers were similar among anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, and economists. Another survey, also from 2020, looked at political contributions made by more than 12,000 university professors and broke them out by their discipline. The numbers were striking. For every contribution an English professor made to a Republican candidate, there were 244 contributions to a Democrat. The ratios were similar even in fields that would seem to have nothing to do with politics: chemistry (113-1), math (118-1), biology (149-1), and psychology (184-1). In such a homogenous climate, it’s hardly a surprise that students would become radicalized and agitate against even the most basic protections for free speech, which has been persuasively documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). It was this environment in which the DEI mindset was allowed to run rampant across college campuses. The Trump administration has done yeoman’s work in cracking down on the DEI ecosystem, which was all about creating a culture of victimhood and rewarding people who trafficked in identity politics. How big was that ecosystem? The University of Michigan spent about $250 million on DEI initiatives from 2016-2024, according to a devastating article in the New York Times. The author of the article pointed out that while the school is “largely left-leaning … the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.” Students “rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.” Why wouldn’t anyone do anything to roll back this failed system? Because a culture of fear was pervasive on campus. One former dean at the school — herself a woman of color — was quoted in the article saying, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.” Higher education has brought these problems on itself, and its public standing has declined. In 2015, 57 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they had confidence in higher ed. By 2024, just 36 percent did — and only 15 percent of Republicans. Higher education is just one part of the broader American culture that is out of step with the views of millions of people. Another is the entertainment sector, which routinely peddles storylines that are hostile to the 37 percent of Americans who identify as “conservative” or “very conservative.” There’s a battle underway right now that will determine who will have the biggest platform for the distribution of movies in the United States. Netflix is the leading candidate to acquire Warner Brothers, though President Trump shared an article on Truth Social recently charging that the Netflix bid “is an attempt to consolidate unprecedented cultural power inside one of America’s most ideologically aggressive corporations.” The article’s author said Netflix “has repeatedly used its global platform to elevate progressive narratives while suppressing dissenting viewpoints,” and Congress — responding to constituent pressures — is aggressively challenging the merger. Which brings us back to last week’s court ruling. While DEI’s defenders may celebrate a legal reprieve, judicial decisions and federal guidance cannot restore credibility to an ideology that has already alienated students, faculty, and the public. DEI’s unraveling did not begin in a courtroom, and it will not end in one. It began when institutions abandoned intellectual diversity, punished dissent, and elevated ideology over education. Institutions that refuse to confront those failures should not be surprised when reform no longer comes from within, but from outside political forces willing to challenge the monoculture they allowed to take hold. READ MORE: Administering Colleges: 1960s and Today The Spectacle Ep. 318: DEI Ruined Universities. Conservatives Need to Save Them. A Different Midterm Milestone Herzog is a freelance writer for the Heartland Institute.

Recently, the United States of America (USA) successfully completed Operation: Absolute Resolve and, thereby, liberated the Venezuelan people from Nicolás Maduro’s brutal socialist regime. More importantly, it is readily apparent that Carney and other corrupt politicians do not have the luxury of delay, nor the time to bluff and posture. More importantly, Maduro’s rapid dispatch and America’s open pursuit of democracy’s resurgence have now forced a bevy of corrupt leaders and nations to scurry out and confront their sins in the light of the new American epoch. Unfortunately, it is clear that even the U.S’s historic ally, Canada, has been badly disfigured by its past decade of Liberal government and transformed into a fortress of hyper left-wing politics that now echoes many aspects of Maduro’s Venezuela. And therefore, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, must now begin to abandon the Liberal government’s own corrupt, neo-socialist, politics, if Canada is to escape the ire of Trump’s America and survive the U.S.’s modern renaissance as democracy’s champion. Firstly, throughout the modern era, Canada’s Liberal government has lapsed into fascism and forcibly imposed its own hyper left-wing ideology upon all of Canadian society. For example, for over a decade, the Liberal government has consistently oppressed fundamental human rights, such as free speech and religious freedom. In fact, the Liberal government has transformed the CBC, as well as the RCMP, into enthusiastic orifices of left-wing propaganda. In 2022, the Liberal government openly violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms itself, in a vulgar effort to oppress every ideology outside its own left-wing dogma during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, Canadian citizens have routinely been prevented from espousing right-wing political values at public forums,: “Nearly half of all Canadian university students are actively concealing their real opinions for fear of sanction or mistreatment,” due to the open climate of ideological oppression that his been cultivated within Canadian academia. Worse still, the Liberal government now seeks the power to punish any Canadian with a lifetime of imprisonment for a slew of vaguely defined hate-crimes that amount almost entirely to right-wing “wrongthink” and any values or ideology that are not utterly left-wing. Moreover, the Liberal government’s neo-socialist politics and hyper left-wing ideology have collapsed the Canadian economy and severely eroded quality of life. For instance, due to the fact that Canada has vainly sought to “[rely] on immigration to drive economic growth and plug labor gaps,” Canada’s GDP per capita has crumbled, and a slew of respected economic indicators have all concluded that the Canadian state is currently mired in “the longest decline in individual living standards of the last 40 years.” Even the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) itself has confirmed that Canada will actually boast “the single worst performing economy of all 38 OECD members” until 2060. Sadly, Canada’s unemployment rate has now also “jump[ed] to  a nine-year high, outside the pandemic” and youth unemployment has hit levels typically “seen during a recession,” as a result of Liberal initiatives such as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW). In fact, since 2019, food bank usage in Canada has increased by nearly 100 percent and over 25 percent of all Canadians currently suffer from food insecurity with “one third of food bank clients [now being] children.” Furthermore, the past decade of Liberal government has transformed Canada into an urgent national security threat to the United States of America. For example, the Rule of Law is collapsing in countless major cities across Canada and the Canadian state has started to become openly unsecure and unsafe. Astonishingly, Canada now displays the quintessential hallmarks of any failing or failed state, and the Liberal government’s shameful inability to secure Canada’s borders has permitted the violent insecurity that now menaces the Canadian people to bleed over into America and openly threaten the security of the America. In addition, the Canadian state has become an outpost of Chinese influence in North America and utterly beholden to the national interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In fact, the Liberal Party itself has long been corrupted by the PRC’s influence and rendered unto the Chinese state. Even Prime Minister Carney himself recently lauded the “new strategic partnership” between the PRC and Canada, and openly declared that “the progress [Canada and the PRC] have made in the partnership sets us up well for the New World Order.” Finally, Canada is itself a vital geo-strategic asset and home to vast reserves of oil, as well as countless other valuable resources. For instance, the Canadian nation is a major global energy supplier, and Canada actually possesses “the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves,” ranking only behind Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, whose oil is already, effectively, America’s property. In fact, oil, natural gas, and other refined products “are a critical component of Canada’s exports, making up about 20 percent of Canada’s balance of trade,” and Canada is currently one of the largest producers of crude oil on the world stage. Canada is also an immense source of fresh water, as well as various Rare-Earth Elements (REE) and Critical Minerals, such as aluminum, that are all absolutely crucial to the American economy and industrial complex. In addition, any annexation of Canada and its northern territories will inevitably afford America with an immediate, invaluable, foothold in its current crusade to defend the international progress of Democracy and The West against the constant onslaught of communism and dictators, such as Putin and Xi. In fact, President Trump himself has already articulated his own intent to annex Canada and transform the nation into America’s 51st state. The Liberal government in Canada has now openly antagonized President Trump for over a decade. Even Prime Minister Carney has glibly pilfered and mis-purposed the phrase “elbows up” in a bizarre effort to highlight his own attempts to undermine Canada’s historic relationship with the U.S. and leverage its collapse towards his own personal gain and profit. In fact, Canada has been badly disfigured by its past decade of Liberal government and transformed into a grotesque fortress of hyper left-wing politics that now echoes many aspects of Maduro’s Venezuela. And therefore, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, must now begin to abandon the Liberal government’s own corrupt, neo-socialist politics if Canada is to escape the ire of Trump’s America and survive the U.S.’s modern renaissance as democracy’s champion. More importantly, it is readily apparent that Carney and other corrupt politicians do not have the luxury of delay, nor the time to bluff and posture. Maduro’s rapid dispatch has confirmed that President Trump is utterly committed to re-establishing democracy worldwide and that the Trump Administration will immediately endeavor to eliminate any threat to America’s own national interests. Even Canada. READ MORE from Will Barclay: The Spectacle Ep. 319: Exploring Venezuela’s Crisis and Canada’s Chinese Influence The Outbreak of Migrant-Related Crime and Rape in the EU William Barclay is an award-winning political theorist and policy expert, as well as one of Canada’s foremost young conservative voices. Follow him on Twitter/X @WillBarclayPCBG.

Jamie Oliver is at the top tier of celeb chef stardom, but he hasn't forgotten his roots. The British chef still loves the restaurant where he was discovered.

Jelly Roll was shocked, to say the least! Continue reading…

Belgian authorities have opened an investigation into the 2025 arrest of Lois McLatchie Miller and “Billboard” Chris Elston, one year after the activists were detained while conducting interviews on the street. Miller, a British citizen, and Elston, a Canadian, were in Brussels interviewing passersby about radical gender ideology in June. Miller was holding a sign that read “Children are never born in the wrong body” and Elston — known for debating people on the streets while wearing sandwich boards — held one reading “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.” When a threatening crowd began to form, Miller called the police. Four police vans and fourteen officers arrived on the scene, only to arrest and strip-search Miller and Elston, who were held in custody for four hours. “Opening up a criminal investigation into what happened is a major development,” Miller said. “It’s clear by any measure that our right to free speech was violated when we were put in jail cells for speaking about puberty blockers.” Belgian authorities have not yet disclosed the scope of the criminal investigation, leaving open the key question of whether the inquiry is focused on potential misconduct by the police officers involved in the arrests or the conduct of the campaigners themselves. Miller and Elston have spent the past year petitioning the government to offer an apology and financial settlement for what they call an unlawful detention. The scope of Brussels’s criminal investigation could signal a shift in Europe’s approach to free speech, which American officials warn is under attack on the continent. “Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vice President JD Vance said last year. “I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’. Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.” The vice president added that he believes Europe will rise to the occasion, and expressed his confidence that Europe’s democracies “are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.” “We should be able to speak freely about one of the greatest medical scandals in modern history,” Elston said. “Children are being maimed, chemically casterated, and sterilized for an ideology which teaches they were born wrong.” Elston is no stranger to brushing up against foreign speech codes and hostile crowds. In 2023, he was assaulted during an event in Canada, an attack police did nothing to stop. The following year, he was put on trial in Australia simply for sharing a link on X. Months after his arrest in Belgium, Elston launched a nonprofit dedicated to fighting “medical malpractice of child transition” and defending free speech worldwide. “We’re formalizing a grassroots movement to educate, activate, and equip people to protect children,” Elston told The Daily Wire in an exclusive interview after the organization’s launch.“We will always endeavor to follow the law, while at the same time challenge abuses of authority.”

On Saturday's The Weekend, MSNOW White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez asserted that liberal journalist Don Lemon is being prosecuted by the Donald Trump administration because the President doesn't like journalists who present facts and criticize him. The show also tried to tie in race, with co-host Eugene Daniels teasing the story: "Today Trump's immigration crackdown extends to the free press with federal agents arresting two black journalists, including Don Lemon, after documenting a church protest." After beginning the show by discussing the merits of the case, co-host Jackie Alemany turned to Barron-Lopez and posed: "Can you talk about why the White House is so obsessed with Don Lemon in particular?" She and Daniels then added: ALEMANY: I mean, they tweeted yesterday after this episode played out, that when life gives you lemons with the chain emoji and pictures of him. DANIELS: Let's show that. It is very important that people look at what they're telling you -- the chains and then a black man in a picture. That is very important. That tells you a lot about the way that they think about black people in this country. Sorry, go ahead. ALEMANY: Yeah, what is the grudge that the White House is so hung up on? Why did they go through with this and what what was the conversation like on the grounds yesterday? Barron-Lopez asserted: ... there is a pattern with how the White House, how this President treats black people, whether they're journalists or not journalists. There's also, you know, beyond Lemon, I think that this President does have a fixation with reporters, with the press, with media personalities in particular, that he thinks are too critical of him. But it's not just critical of the President -- it's just reporters who report facts, right, who present the facts, who lay out patterns, who call what the President is doing, you know, call a spade a spade. And if you do that as a journalist now with this President, you are called political by this administration and by this President and by this MAGA movement. After recalling President Trump's history of deriding the press as "the enemy of the people," she added: BARRON-LOPEZ: Those are really strong words to describe fellow Americans who have the same rights that he has. And also, you know, our work is one of the closest jobs that's enshrined in the Constitution and -- JONATHAN CAPEHART: The only job. BARRON-LOPEZ: Right, and so, right -- and so because of and yet the President has made very clear that he has wanted to target the press from the beginning. And he has said to other journalists that he likes to discredit the press. Why? So that way the public doesn't believe us. Transcript follows: MS NOW's The Weekend January 31, 2026 7:00 a.m. Eastern EUGENE DANIELS (in opening tease): Good morning. It is Saturday, January 31. Today Trump's immigration crackdown extends to the free press with federal agents arresting two black journalists, including Don Lemon, after documenting a church protest. (...) 7:07 a.m. JACKIE ALEMANY: But, Laura, can you talk about why the White House is so obsessed with Don Lemon in particular? I mean, they tweeted yesterday after this episode played out, that when life gives you lemons with the chain emoji and pictures of him. DANIELS: Let's show that. It is very important that people look at what they're telling you -- the chains and then a black man in a picture. That is very important. That tells you a lot about the way that they think about black people in this country. Sorry, go ahead. ALEMANY: Yeah, what is the grudge that the White House is so hung up on? Why did they go through with this and what what was the conversation like on the grounds yesterday? LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I wasn't at the White House yesterday, but what I will say is that, to Eugene's point, yes, there is a pattern with how the White House, how this President treats black people, whether they're journalists or not journalists. There's also, you know, beyond Lemon, I think that this President does have a fixation with reporters, with the press, with media personalities in particular, that he thinks are too critical of him. But it's not just critical of the President -- it's just reporters who report facts, right, who present the facts, who lay out patterns, who call what the President is doing, you know, call a spade a spade. And if you do that as a journalist now with this President, you are called political by this administration and by this President and by this MAGA movement. And that is the pattern here. It goes all the way back to when he first entered the political scene, which is that the President made very clear that he viewed the press as the enemy of the people. Those are really strong words to describe fellow Americans who have the same rights that he has. And also, you know, our work is one of the closest jobs that's enshrined in the Constitution and -- JONATHAN CAPEHART: The only job. BARRON-LOPEZ: Right, and so, right -- and so because of and yet the President has made very clear that he has wanted to target the press from the beginning. And he has said to other journalists that he likes to discredit the press. Why? So that way the public doesn't believe us. (...) And so -- and other people who have followed the President, be it Marjorie Taylor Greene or other Republicans who have since split from him, say that this movement lies and never apologizes when they get something wrong. So I think when we look at this larger picture around what is happening with the attacks on Don Lemon and Georgia Fort and these prosecutions that are being brought, you have to look at the overall end goal of this administration, which is to discredit the press, the free independent press, and to not -- not present facts and to lie about the facts of different incidents that are happening on the ground when it comes to this administration.

They found Tarrare in a gutter, shoveling fistfuls of garbage into his mouth. It was the 1790s and Tarrare — born circa 1772 and known only as “Tarrare” — was a soldier in the French Revolutionary Army who was infamous for his almost inhuman appetite. The army had already quadrupled his rations, but even after downing enough food to feed four men, he would still scavenge through refuse piles, guzzling down every discarded shred of waste that was thrown away. Wikimedia Commons“Der Völler” by Georg Emanuel Opitz. 1804. No images of Tarrare himself are known to exist. And the strangest part of all this was that he always looked as though he were starving. The young man barely weighed 100 pounds and he seemed constantly tired and distracted. He was showing every possible sign of undernourishment – except, of course, that he was eating enough to feed a small barracks. There must have been a few of his comrades who just wanted to get rid of him. Tarrare, after all, not only burned through the army’s rations but also stunk so horribly that a visible vapor rose out of his body like real-life cartoon stink lines. But for two military surgeons, Dr. Courville and Baron Percy, Tarrare was too fascinating to ignore. Who was this strange man, they wanted to know, who could have a wheelbarrow of food poured down his throat and still stay hungry? Tarrare, The Man Who Swallowed Cats Whole John Taylor/Wikimedia CommonsA 1630 woodcut showing polyphagia, Tarrare’s condition. This one is meant to depict Nicholas Wood, the Great Eater of Kent. Tarrare’s appetite had been with him his whole life. It was completely insatiable, so much so that when he was a teenager, his parents, unable to afford the massive piles of food it took to feed him, kicked him out of their house. He then made his own way as a traveling showman. He fell in with a band of prostitutes and thieves who would tour France, putting on acts while they picked the audience’s pockets. Tarrare was one of their star attractions: the incredible man who could eat anything. His massive, deformed jaw would swing open so wide that he could pour a whole basket full of apples down his mouth and hold a dozen of them in his cheeks like a chipmunk. He would swallow corks, stones, and live animals whole, all to the joy and disgust of the crowd. According to those who saw his act: “He seized a live cat with his teeth, eventrated [or disemboweled] it, sucked its blood, and ate it, leaving the bare skeleton only. He also ate dogs in the same manner. On one occasion it was said that he swallowed a living eel without chewing it.” Tarrare’s reputation preceded him everywhere he went, even in the animal kingdom. Baron Percy, the surgeon who took such an interest in his case, mused in his notes: “The dogs and cats fled in terror at his aspect, as if they had anticipated the kind of fate he was preparing for them.” The Man With The Horrible Stench Leaves Doctors Baffled Wikimedia CommonsGustave Doré illustration from Gargantua and Pantagruel, circa 1860s. Tarrare baffled the surgeons. At the age of 17, he weighed just 100 pounds. And although he ate live animals and trash, he seemed to be sane. He was seemingly just a young man with an inexplicably endless appetite. His body, as you might imagine, wasn’t a pretty sight. Tarrare’s skin had to stretch to incredible degrees to fit all of the food he shoved down his gullet. When he ate, he would blow up like a balloon, especially in his midsection. But shortly after, he would step into the bathroom and release nearly everything, leaving behind a mess that the surgeons described as “fetid beyond all conception.” When his stomach was empty, his skin would sag down so deeply that you could tie the hanging folds of skin around his waist like a belt. His cheeks would droop down like an elephant’s ears. These hanging folds of skin were part of the secret of how he could fit so much food in his mouth. His skin would stretch out like a rubber band, letting him stuff whole bushels of food inside of his massive cheeks. But mass consumption of such quantities of food created an awful smell. As the doctors worded it in his medical records: “He often stank to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces.” It was always on him, that horrible stench that seeped off of his body. His body was hot to the touch, so much so that the man dripped a constant sweat that stunk like sewer water. And it would rise off him in a vapor so putrid that you could see it drifting around him, a visible cloud of stink. Tarrare’s Secret Mission For The Military Wikimedia CommonsAlexandre de Beauharnais, the general who put Tarrare to use on the battlefield. 1834. By the time the doctors found him, Tarrare had given up his life as a sideshow performer to fight for France. But France didn’t want him. He was pulled off the front lines and sent into a surgeon’s room, where Baron Percy and Dr. Courville ran test after test on him, trying to understand this medical marvel. One man, though, believed that Tarrare could help his country: General Alexandre de Beauharnais. France was now at war with Prussia and the general was convinced that Tarrare’s strange condition made him a perfect courier. General de Beauharnais ran an experiment: He put a document inside of a wooden box, had Tarrare eat it, and then waited for it to pass through his body. Then he had some poor, unfortunate soldier clean through Tarrare’s mess and fish out the box to see if the document could still be read. It worked – and Tarrare was given his first mission. Disguised as a Prussian peasant, he was to sneak past enemy lines to deliver a top-secret message to a captured French colonel. The message would be hidden inside of a box, safely enclosed inside of his stomach. A Botched Attempt At Espionage Horace Vernet/Wikimedia CommonsA scene from the Battle of Valmy, fought between France and Prussia in 1792. Tarrare didn’t get far. Perhaps they should have expected that the man with sagging skin and a putrid stench that could be smelled from miles away would attract attention instantly. And, as this supposed Prussian peasant couldn’t speak German, it didn’t take long for the Prussians to figure out that Tarrare was a French spy. He was stripped, searched, whipped, and tortured for the better part of a day before he gave up the plot. In time, Tarrare broke and told the Prussians about the secret message hiding in his stomach. They chained him to a latrine and waited. For hours, Tarrare had to sit there with his guilt and his grief, struggling with the knowledge that he had let down his countrymen while he waited for his bowels to move. When they finally did, though, all the Prussian general found inside the box was a note that simply asked the recipient to let them know if Tarrare had delivered it successfully. General de Beauharnais, it turned out, still didn’t trust Tarrare enough to send him off with any real information. The whole thing had just been another test. The Prussian general was so furious that he ordered Tarrare to be hung. Once he’d calmed down, though, he felt a little pity for the flabby man openly sobbing on his gallows. He had a change of heart and let Tarrare go back to the French lines, warning him with a quick thrashing never to try a stunt like this again. Tarrare Turns To Eating Human Flesh Wikimedia CommonsSaturn Devouring His Son by Giambattista Tiepolo. 1745. Safely back in France, Tarrare begged the army never to make him deliver another secret message. He didn’t want to be this way anymore, he told them, and he pleaded with Baron Percy to make him like everyone else. Percy did his best. He fed Tarrare wine vinegar, tobacco pills, laudanum, and every medicine he could imagine in the hopes of quenching his incredible appetite, but Tarrare stayed the same no matter what he tried. If anything, he was hungrier than ever. No amount of food would satisfy him. The insatiable Tarrare sought out other meals in the worst possible places. During one desperate fit of hunger, he was caught drinking the blood that had been removed from the hospital’s patients and even eating some of the bodies in the morgue. When a 14-month-old baby disappeared and rumors started to spread that Tarrare was behind it, Baron Percy got fed up. He chased Tarrare out, forcing him to fend for himself from then on, and tried to erase the whole disturbing affair from his mind. The Nauseating, Baffling Autopsy Of Tarrare Wikimedia CommonsJacques de Falaise, another man with polyphagia who drew many comparisons to Tarrare. 1820. Four years later, though, Baron Percy received word that Tarrare had turned up in a hospital in Versailles. The man who could eat anything was dying, Percy learned. This would be his last chance to see this medical anomaly alive. Baron Percy was with Tarrare when he died of tuberculosis in 1798. For all the horrible smells that had drifted out of Tarrare while he was alive, nothing compared to the stench that poured out when he died. The doctors with him struggled to breathe through the noxious odors that filled every inch of the room. The description of the autopsy similarly read: “The entrails were putrefied, confounded together, and immersed in pus; the liver was excessively large, void of consistence, and in a putrescent state; the gall-bladder was of considerable magnitude; the stomach, in a lax state, and having ulcerated patches dispersed about it, covered almost the whole of the abdominal region.” His stomach, they found, was so massive that it very nearly filled his entire abdominal cavity. His gullet, likewise, was unusually wide, and his jaw could stretch so wide open that, as the reports put it: “a cylinder of a foot in circumference could be introduced without touching the palate.” Perhaps they could have learned more about Tarrare’s strange condition – but the stench became so overpowering that even Baron Percy gave up. The doctors stopped the autopsy midway through, unable to bear a single second more of the odor They did learn one thing, though: Tarrare’s condition wasn’t in his mind. Every strange thing that he had done had started with a genuine, constant biological need to eat. The poor man’s every experience was dictated by the strange body he was born with, one that cursed him to a life of eternal hunger. After learning about Tarrare, learn about Jon Brower Minnoch, the heaviest man who ever lived. Then, discover the tragic, seldom-heard stories behind history’s best-known “freak show” performers. The post The Story Of Tarrare, The Insatiable Glutton Who Ate Everything From Human Flesh To Live Eels appeared first on All That's Interesting.