Can We Stop Talking About Olivia Nuzzi...

...and start asking questions about RFK, Jr.?

This guy now runs the Department of Health and Human Services. And yes, this is a picture of RFK,Jr. posing with what appears to be a barbecued dog carcass.

Before today’s main event, we really need to catch-up:

• This looks bad, because it is. Signalgate Report Says Hegseth Could Have Endangered Troops - The Atlantic

  [The] Pentagon’s top watchdog has concluded that the information Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in the chat could have put the mission, U.S. personnel, and national security at risk had it fallen into the wrong hands. The information Hegseth shared included the precise times that fighter pilots would attack their targets, the sort of information ordinarily shared only on secure platforms. If Houthi militants had learned those details in advance, they might have been able to shoot down American planes or better defend their positions…¹

• North Korean lickspittles blush: “US Institute of Peace officially renamed for Trump.” (FFS.)

• MAGGA: Make America Gas Guzzle Again. “Trump announces roll back of Biden-era vehicle fuel efficiency rules” - ABC News

• Sad. “Poll: Trump’s own voters begin blaming him for affordability crisis” - POLITICO

• American street scenes, circa 2025: ‘I’m a U.S. citizen.’ Agents pull woman from car in Keys. Feds said she wouldn’t show ID

  A woman in medical scrubs who was driving on U.S. 1 in the Florida Keys Wednesday morning was stopped by federal immigration agents and forcibly removed from her car, despite screaming she was an American citizen….

  She can be heard screaming as agents attempted to handcuff her. “I’m a U.S. citizen, please help me,” she shouted after agents forced her to the ground. “This is unfair. Why are you doing this to me?”….

  After agents removed the woman from her car, they found her driver’s license in the vehicle, ran it through their system and confirmed she is a U.S. citizen.

  Happy Thursday. Note to readers:

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Some questions for RFK, Jr.?

A reminder: While entertaining to the masses, libidinous narcissism does not endanger the lives and health of millions of people.

I am, of course referring to the saga of Olivia Nuzzi and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a sordid tale that has absolutely engrossed the media and political world. The New Yorker describes it as “a niche-celebrity soap opera, generating an explosion of publicity and social-media commentary and mesmerizing a public whose interest, whether prurient or high-minded, appeared inexhaustible.” (And, yes, there is a footnote here that you should read.)²

If you have somehow managed to avoid it, the shortish version is this: “star” journalist Olivia Nuzzi imploded her career by having a dalliance with RFK Jr. while she was covering him. So it was a sex scandal layered on top of a journalism scandal.

Nuzzi is trying to resurrect her career with a pretentiously embarrassing book, which is being panned by the critics. The reviews range from scathing to Oh my God, that’s going to leave a crater where Nuzzi’s career used to be. (We really need a new word —perhaps brutalacious — to describe the sort of jeering reception Nuzzi’s book is receiving.)

Meanwhile, her former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, is publishing a series of articles festooned with dirty laundry, including allegations about Nuzzi’s other extracurricular activities.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr. — the guy The Atlantic dubbed the “Most Powerful Man in Science” — has been unscathed.³ As Colby Hall notes, “Robert Kennedy Jr. walks out of the Olivia Nuzzi scandal still wearing the title HHS Secretary as if the whole mess were a minor scheduling hiccup.”

RFK Jr. didn’t lose his job. He didn’t lose standing. He didn’t lose credibility within the very political-media ecosystem that supposedly values propriety. The scandal barely grazed him. She’s unemployed; he’s still sitting in the Cabinet.

**

At this point a trigger WARNING seems appropriate, because the details are gag-inducing. But some of the charges actually do raise some rather serious questions that curious minds might want to pursue.

Let’s leave aside RFK’s “romantic poetry” to Nuzzi, which, according to Lizza, included this bit of whatthefuqdidIjustread: (DO NOT READ WHILE EATING.)

“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, had written to my then-fiancé. “Drink from me Love.”

He continued, “I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Dont spill a drop’. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.”

Unfortunately, there’s more stuff like that. A lot more. According to Lizza’s (admittedly biased) account:

Bobby would show Olivia intense love and affection and express, say, a deep commitment to having a child together. But then, generally after he, um, relieved himself, he would become angry, defensive, and guilt-ridden, and he would lash out at her, blaming Olivia for “making” him say those loving things to her.

Lizza’s account also raises more substantive — and troubling— questions about the man who holds the nation’s public health system hostage. A short list:

Kennedy “doesn’t actually believe a lot of [the anti-vax stuff], which is actually the weirdest part.”

Which would be Big if True.

Kennedy’s aides believed he was using drugs again, and Kennedy confessed to Olivia that he was using ketamine.

This seems newsy?

Olivia believed Kennedy was a sex addict and that he was having multiple affairs, including with both his [REDACTED] and his [REDACTED].

Redacted?

Olivia explained that Kennedy had told her he wanted to “bind,” “subdue,” “tame,” “possess,” and “discipline” her, and that these sexual proclivities for bondage and “total submission” carried over into the rest of their relationship in the way that he maintained “control” over her …

Uhhhhhhhhhh.

Since we are collectively obsessed with Nuzzi’s love life, perhaps more information about her male partner would be of interest? If only for its gossip value? Since questions of character, judgment, and honesty seem to be off the table?

But as, Helen Lewis notes in her review of Nuzzi’s book, “After a decade of Trumpism, no one is bothering to even half-heartedly suggest that [Kennedy] should resign his high government post. He doesn’t need to ‘reclaim the narrative’ because he’s too busy helping kids catch measles.”

**

So how do we explain the fact that Kennedy is skating through this seamy mess? Two reasons spring to mind:

(1) We live in a post scandal era, especially when it involves an administration headed by a serial philandering sex abuser. Peccadilloes that would have ended careers in any other time, barely register in the age of Trump, so why bother.

(2) It’s RFK Junior, FFS. This is the guy who had a brain worm, once ate a dog, and stashed a dead baby bear in a park. The guy whose first wife committed suicide after reading about his multiple affairs, and who has admitted to being a drug and sex addict. So why should this even register on the Richter Scale of Outrage? To repeat a point I made yesterday: If news is defined as novelty, there is decidedly nothing novel about the fact that Bobby is thoroughly fucked up. It is not breaking news that the man who runs the nation’s health system is a manic bounder and a cad with (I’m sorry to repeat this) at least one brain worm.

So, we cut another bent man some slack while we luxuriate in the serialized self-immolation of two journalists who lack the power to enshittify the nation’s health care system.

Today’s Podcast

Thursday dogs

Boys getting ready for Christmas.

1

Via the Atlantic:

The Defense Department inspector general found that while the mission ultimately was not jeopardized, Hegseth violated his department’s own policies when he used Signal, a commercial messaging app that is not approved for sharing classified information. The IG’s report, scheduled to be published on Thursday, was described to us by numerous U.S. officials familiar with its findings….

The report also found that the information Hegseth shared was classified at the time he received it. (Trump administration officials had tried publicly to argue otherwise.) Battlefield information like what Hegseth shared is routinely classified because of the risk it would pose to U.S. forces were it exposed. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East, had classified the information about the air strike as secret, according to defense officials who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity.

But the report also found that Hegseth, as the secretary, had the authority to declassify information, Kelly noted. Less clear is why Hegseth thought it was appropriate or necessary to do so. The secretary did not give an interview to the inspector general, according to people familiar with the matter.

2. A confession: I am not casting stones because I live in a house of glass. I’ve devoured every bit of this story with the fascination of watching a kerosene-loaded train crash in the midst of a Sharknado. And that’s only in part because I have an extremely tangential relationship to the main figures. I’ve hosted Nuzzi on my podcast and interacted with her briefly (and cordially) in the past.

My only vaguely interesting story: a few years ago, when my French grandson, Elliott, accompanied me to a conference, we all sat at the same dinner table. The interaction between Nuzzi and a former colleague was so friendly that my grandson’s Gallic sensibilities led him to conclude that they must be married to one another. I assured him that was not the case and was impossible. When I told Nuzzi and my colleague what Elliott had said, both were highly amused. I think.

3. Via Semafor’s Shelby Talcott

As the messy public breakup between journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza keeps Washington insiders buzzing, the third party at the center of the story has been noticeably silent. And HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who denied the digital affair with Nuzzi when it was first reported more than a year ago, is likely to stay quiet. “This is solely about book sales and revenge — book sales for her [Nuzzi] and revenge for him [Lizza], and there’s zero upside in engaging here,” one person familiar with the dynamic told Semafor. “Bobby and [wife] Cheryl [Hines] and the administration moved on from this a year ago.” An HHS spokesperson declined to comment on Kennedy-related allegations that Lizza attributed to Nuzzi, including that the now-secretary used ketamine and was aware of an operation Nuzzi orchestrated to secretly record Trump.