2025-12-30 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
In early April, as the planet’s richest man chainsawed apart the livelihoods of thousands of hard-working Americans, I was back in Princeton, New Jersey, where I once attended high school, to visit my dad and cover the local “Hands Off” protest against President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions.
Michael Lewis was speaking at the university that week, along with Dave Eggers and journalist Casey Cep, to promote a new book titled, Who Is Government? Lewis had recruited these and other authors to profile unsung heroes toiling behind the scenes in the civil service. These were talented, selfless, innovative, people whom nobody ever would have heard of, but who had nonetheless done incredible things on behalf of the public—improving services, saving money and lives, and generally making America greater.
So we went to the event. Lewis, colorful as always, set about telling the story of his main character, when all of a sudden, it struck me: I know these people!
His protagonist had grown up in Princeton and I’d been to his house many dozens of times. Christopher Mark was the eldest brother of a kid I hung out with regularly. My friends and I used to sit around in their living room, listening to music, smoking pot, and pilfering his dad’s liquor. I don’t think I ever met Chris, and certainly never knew he’d ended up working for the federal government, where his out-of-the-box thinking led to a way of reducing mine cave-ins that has saved countless lives in the United States and around the world.
We rarely hear these stories, in part because they get drowned out by the small-government, anti-labor rhetoric of the right. Instead, when we think about civil servants, we often think about inefficiency, DC gridlock, maybe some imagined IRS auditor—or the tired DMV clerk who barely acknowledged our presence that time.
It’s easy to depict a faceless bureaucracy as a monster. Historically and otherwise, the Republican Party has aimed to do just that—and the Trump-era scapegoating amounts to extreme assholism. But the right-wing haters have got it wrong.
Federal workers are, as a whole, heroes.
From staving off pandemics to tracking down loose nukes to compiling key economic data to predicting the paths of killer storms, they serve thousands of critical functions that we—as least until the Trump administration started breaking them—have taken for granted. They are also our neighbors, scattered all over the country—the vast majority work outside the DC area. We need them and their talents. They shouldn’t have to deal with all this bullshit.
Let’s rewind a bit. The conservative establishment has railed against the federal government since at least the mid-1970s—too big, too bloated, etc. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address, adding that America’s woes “parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”
“It’s not my intention to do away with government,” Reagan went on. “It is rather to make it work…Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”
In fact, it is the government that needs smothering, said Reagan acolyte Grover Norquist, who founded the antitax group Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 (at Reagan’s request, he claims), and later launched the Reagan Legacy Project to memorialize him. “I don’t want to abolish government,” Norquist told NPR’s Mara Liasson in 2001. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
That’s where we’re at now: The bathtub drowning.
The federal workforce actually increased by 195,000 (about 7 percent), under Reagan, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those gains were wiped out during the 1990s, mainly under President Bill Clinton. The civil service began to grow again on President Joe Biden’s watch, but as Trump took office in January, federal workers still comprised just 1.8 percent of the US labor force, versus 2.5 percent at the end of Reagan’s presidency.
And then came the chainsaw.
Elon Musk “doesn’t understand context… He’s the one trick pony,” and his trick doesn’t work in government. “Breaking things is not actually the road to productivity.”
Past Republican politicians assailed the size and scope of government but were generally respectful of its employees—despite griping that a federal job was a “job for life,” as Newt Gingrich put it. It was too hard to hire and fire, they said. “The civil service system,” New York University expert Paul Light told the Washington Post in late 2016, after Trump announced plans for a federal hiring freeze, is “very slow at hiring, negligent in disciplining, permissive in promoting.”
These are fair criticisms, and ones that federal workers also would like to see addressed.
I spoke not long ago with Max Stier, CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit whose mission is “building a better government and a stronger democracy.” Every year, his organization conducts a massive survey of workers across the federal government—more than a million participate—and “employees think that poor performers are not dealt with effectively,” he told me.
I had reached out to talk about the Trump administration’s assault on federal workers, rhetorical and actual, which was unprecedented—and the onslaught of egregious management behavior: Loyalty tests. Creepy DOGE demands that distracted people from their work. Mass firings by email and tweets. And an utter lack of transparency about what was happening and who was calling the shots.
Improving hiring and promotion, and dealing appropriately with bad apples and deadwood—these are solvable problems. But broadly demonizing public employees, of whom the majority care deeply about their missions, and who work as hard as anyone—often for low pay and certainly with less recognition—is no solution.
Try telling that to Russell Vought. As Trump fended off lawsuits and criminal charges (with mixed results) en route to his second term, Vought, Trump’s former (and current) Office of Management and Budget director, was hatching a diabolical plan.
In speeches unearthed by ProPublica, he called Trump’s candidacy a “gift of God” and spoke of changes that would facilitate mass layoffs of workers who enjoyed civil service protections. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said, a tad gleefully. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
Other Trumpy conservatives embraced similarly hateful vibes. As Mother Jones‘ Anna Rogers notes in her recent story about resistance from public sector unions:
Amid DOGE’s assault, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a nonsensical tirade suggesting that federal jobs are not “real jobs” and federal workers “do not deserve their paychecks.” Such sentiments were pervasive long before Trump’s minions started kneecapping the federal workforce. In a May 2024 proposal to reduce federal employee benefits, House Republicans asserted, “The biggest losers in this system are hardworking taxpayers who are forced to subsidize the bloated salaries of unqualified and unelected bureaucrats working to force a liberal agenda on a country that does not want it.”
Musk, shoving empathy into a wood chipper, suggested that slaving away for billionaire owners is somehow a higher calling than government service.
It’s not that business principles shouldn’t be used to run government better, Stier told me. They should. Yet government can’t—and shouldn’t—be run like a business, because it has “phenomenally large” constraints that don’t exist in the private sector. Thanks to shifting politics, for one, agency budgets change abruptly and funding often isn’t appropriated on time. (We spoke well before the latest shutdown.) Also, as I pointed out to my colleague Garrison Hayes a while back, the government performs all kinds of services whose value cannot be quantified on a balance sheet.
Federal agencies are massive, and the talent to run them does exist in the private sector, Stier says, but it’s a “small subset” of leaders who can grapple with that shift in context—leaders who “know what they don’t know, and know they need to learn, and know they need to rely on the people who are there to succeed.”
More often, especially under Trump, the people who come in are more like Musk: “He doesn’t understand context. He doesn’t understand the difference and doesn’t care. He’s the one trick pony, and that trick I don’t think really worked in the private sector, and it doesn’t work at all in government. Breaking things is not actually the road to productivity, and it has very large public consequences,” Stier says.
“When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership. You’re losing guidance and mentoring. “
Part of our problem is weak PR: Political leaders within agencies are terrified of criticism, so they control access to their workforce in ways that prevent good news from getting out. (Trump’s agencies tend to just pump out trollish propaganda.) But Stier, who has come to understand the federal workforce better than just about anyone, gets to see the positive aspects. And contrary to Trumpian rhetoric, “the reality of the culture of the place is one of service. They’re not clock watchers. They’re not lazy. They’re people who are there for purpose. If they’re in NASA, it’s because they want to explore the universe. If they’re at the VA, it’s because they want to serve veterans,” Stier says.
“And the place where the federal workforce exceeds private sector norms is around that sense of purpose, the willingness to go the extra mile,” he continues. “Where they fare most poorly against the private sector is around the quality of leaders, and that’s a longstanding problem created by the fact that the people in the top don’t care about management—and that has huge implications for the entire organization.”
That is, when things go wrong, it’s often the political bosses fucking them up.
Since January, for instance, Trump has had seven different people—seven!—overseeing the IRS. The latest acting commissioner is Scott Bessent, who is also Treasury Secretary—because managing enormous agencies is so easy, you can just double up.
For his second term, President Barack Obama appointed as IRS chief John Koskinen, who had deep experience turning around large organizations in the private sector. Koskinen spent his first three and a half months on the job visiting two large IRS offices every week, holding lunches and town hall meetings with rank and file staff. “My theory has always been, if you want to know what’s going on in an organization, go talk to the people doing the work,” he told me back in April. “And I was just delighted with the level of [commitment].”
By contrast, three and a half months into Trump’s second term, tens of thousands of IRS workers had read the tea leaves and accepted a DOGE buyout. This exodus would include “a significant number of very experienced managers and executives,” Koskinen predicted. “Over 30 percent of the IRS has always been eligible for retirement, but they don’t retire, because they’re committed to the mission. When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership. You’re losing guidance and mentoring. You really are disabling the IRS.”
Trump’s deputies also fired nearly all IRS employees hired under President Biden, again decimating the agency’s ability—only recently regained—to pursue wealthy tax cheats and complete sophisticated audits of billionaires and private partnerships with opaque ownership structures.
This is gonna cost us dearly. In late 2023, Democratic members of the congressional Joint Economic Committee cautioned (unsuccessfully) against IRS enforcement cuts, noting that every dollar spent auditing high-income Americans brings in $12 in revenue. Under Trump, the agency’s unstable leadership, decimated workforce, and gutted budget—not to mention the prospect of his toadies illegally weaponizing the IRS—bode poorly for revenue collections and for the prospect of a smooth 2026 tax season, with Americans getting refunds on time.
This was all a management failure that would never be tolerated in the private sector. “Having spent 20 years doing turnarounds of large, failed enterprises,” Koskinen told me, “the last thing I ever thought was: Well, let’s starve the revenue arm! The salespeople—cut them back!“
When our government screws up, we freak out—and yet we rarely bother to recognize the career people who work tirelessly, and without any fanfare, to keep things functioning as they should. “I would say the vast majority of people rely on social programs, some of which they don’t even realize are funded by the federal government,” Koskinen told me. “All of those are at risk. When you cut park rangers, suddenly there are long lines trying to get into a park.”
That was a prescient example. On December 16, the Washington Post wrote about an internal Forest Service report showing that public lands are now rapidly deteriorating as a direct result of the Trump administration’s decimation of staff.
Earlier that week, too, the Post had reported that the VA planned to abruptly eliminate 35,000 open positions for doctors, nurses, and other medical roles, bringing VA staff cuts to 65,000 for the year—about 10 percent of its workforce.
The administration claimed the positions were superfluous, but one mental health the Post interviewed said that veterans in her area were already waiting 60 to 90 days for an appointment, and that she and her colleagues were desperate for backup: “We are all doing the work of others to compensate.”
Back in 1981, during his inaugural speech, Reagan had said something else: “Those who say that we’re in a time when there are not heroes, they just don’t know where to look.”
We sure do now.
2025-12-30 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
It seems like a relic now. But Donald Trump’s presidency once saw some of the culture’s most high-profile rappers grab their mics to condemn the president’s authoritarian policies. There was Ice Cube, dropping songs like “Arrest the President,” Childish Gambino shaking the world with the provocative music video for “This is America.”
But for some of those very same artists, Trump’s return to the White House is suddenly sounding copacetic, even good. The worst offender? Nicki Minaj.
There she was last week, a surprise guest at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, where, sitting next to Erika Kirk, Minaj praised JD Vance as an “assassin” and called Trump “dashing” and “handsome.” That was roughly one after Minaj accepted the Trump administration’s invitation to speak at the United Nations, only to parrot Trump’s false claims that the Nigerian government is purposefully ignoring the persecution of Christians by Islamic extremists in the country.
“Churches have been burned,” Minaj said sorrowfully. “Families have been torn apart…simply because of how they pray.” After her speech, UN Ambassador Mike Waltz awarded Minaj a UN hoodie in her signature Barbie pink.
Indeed, Minaj’s recent appearances have been difficult to square with her former self. Take Minaj’s 2016 song “Black Barbies,” a remix of Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles,” in which Minaj condemned Trump’s immigration policies.
“Island girl, Donald Trump want me go home,” she rapped, mentioning the president’s 2016 immigration crackdown. “Still pull up with my wrist like a snowcone.” In another lyric: “Half a milli on the Maybach Pullman, boarded
Now I’m prayin’ all my foreigns don’t get deported.”
In 2018, she shared her own story about immigrating to the US from Trinidad as a child on Instagram. “I came to this country as an illegal immigrant at 5 years old,” Minaj wrote in a now-deleted post. “I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place and having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5.”
She then pleaded with Trump to halt the deportations, writing, “Please stop this. Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now? Not knowing if their parents are dead or alive, if they’ll ever see them again.”
When it comes to immigration, the situation today is markedly worse. As the Trump administration rolls out a brutal policy to deport the 11 million undocumented families living in the United States, has Minaj grown comfortable with family separations?
But it isn’t just a reversal on immigration. Minaj has spent 2025 gushing about Trump and his wife, Melania, reposting a now-deleted video of the couple dancing to a mashup of Minaj’s hit song and the 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” She regularly tweets in support of Trump and his cronies, even granting conservative television host Piers Morgan “clearance to fly through Barb Airspace”—whatever the hell that means.
The GOP has since embraced Minaj. “Nicki > Cardi,” Vice President JD Vance tweeted, while the Team Trump TikTok account posted the following video celebrating Minaj’s MAGA metamorphosis:
Minaj is also now beefing with Democrats and engaging in transphobia, with the rapper committing to a multiday Twitter battle with Gavin Newsom over the California governor’s comments about protecting trans kids’ rights to health care.
There’s simply no way the money is that good, especially when the rest of us see clearly why Trump entertains our support.
But Minaj isn’t the only rapper to make a right-wing rebrand this year.
Rick Ross, who in 2015 had his song “Free Enterprise” yanked from Walmart shelves over lyrics calling to “assassinate Trump like I’m Zimmerman,” not only performed at the president’s second inauguration, but he was also the headliner for this year’s Young Black Republicans Halloween Party. Even Snoop Dogg, whose 2017 music video for “Lavender” featured him aiming a gun at a clown dressed as Trump, showed he was willing to toss aside any existing animosity the second a fat paycheck came around. How else is there to interpret Snoop’s decision to reheat old hits for a room full of tech bros at the president’s Crypto Ball? There’s simply no way the money is that good, especially when the rest of us see clearly why Trump entertains our support: To secure the sweet votes of the Black community while actively dismantling the institutions designed to help us.
Look, I’m not expecting every rapper to be an activist. You don’t have to read James Baldwin to be a good musician. But to go from poignantly telling your own immigration story to full-throatedly supporting MAGA is something else entirely.
So I’ll end with a line from Dr. Karida Brown, author of The Battle for the Black Mind, about rappers claiming that Trump will make them rich, and why Black conservative leaders co-sign this. Here’s what she told me in March:
“In the case of conservative and billionaire boys club movements, they weaponize these tropes and tokenize people to parrot these tropes so that they can poison their own wells. And when they’re done with them, they discard them. What happens to tokens? They get spent.”
2025-12-30 06:25:07
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said that her defense of survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and threat to disclose the identities of some of the men who abused them broke her relationship with President Donald Trump, who said his “friends will get hurt” if she went through with it.
Greene’s claim came in remarks from two long interviews published Monday in the New York Times Magazine. After a closed-door meeting with Epstein victims in September and a subsequent news conference where she made the threat to share the names of some of the men, Greene said Trump rebuked her.
“The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” the congresswoman told Robert Draper of New York Times Magazine, highlighting how Epstein went unpunished for decades and was allowed to continue to sexually assault girls and young women.
Greene announced in November that she would resign on January 5, 2026, a year before her term ends. “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked, and used by rich, powerful men should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for,” she stated in the video.
Greene told the Times that the last conversation she had with Trump was when she requested that he invite some of the survivors to the Oval Office. Trump, she recounted, replied that they did not deserve the opportunity.
The congresswoman committed to opposing Republican leadership in the House and Trump, joining Rep Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in a bill that would force the Justice Department to release all of its documents on Epstein.
Another breaking point was the fallout following Charlie Kirk’s assassination. She was shocked when Trump gave the “worst statement” possible at Kirk’s memorial service. “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them,” Trump said, noting it as the right-wing political activist’s weakness.
This was un-Christian to Greene, and she realized that she was part of a “toxic culture” in Washington.
“Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong,” Greene told the Times earlier this month. “You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what.”
This was a stark contrast to many of her fellow public figures on the far right, who blamed the left for Kirk’s assassination. As my colleague Anna Merlan wrote earlier this month, this has led to a MAGA rift, along with conflicts over antisemitism that I reported about last week.
Since the disputes over Epstein and Kirk, Trump contributed to death threats made against her, she claims, including calling her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green (sic)” in a November Truth Social post.
Greene told the Times that she understood that loyalty to Trump was just “a one-way street” that ends “whenever it suits him.”
All of this calls into question whether Greene’s departure from Trump is genuine. She told the Times that she remains a steadfast supporter of the policies on which Trump campaigned. But these clearly have not worked. Greene’s departure also calls into question the future of the Republican Party. Turning Point USA has endorsed JD Vance, but where other groups in the Republican Party go remains uncertain.
Greene’s rehabilitation has doubt attached to it, too, regardless of whether the angle is a campaign for another political position or not. As Mother Jones’ Julianne McShane reported, the congresswoman has still made attempts to reconcile with Trump. And as the Times pointed out, Greene admitted that she only spoke out against Trump when his attacks targeted her.
There’s also the fact that we still live in a political climate ruled by elites. Greene herself is a wealthy co-owner of a construction firm. It’s not a “big tent”—it’s still people at the top conversing with other people at the top on the direction of the country.
2025-12-30 02:51:14
Over the weekend, Covid-cautious individuals shared clips on social media of Jon Stewart punching down on people who are masking, who are presumably doing so to protect themselves from Covid, the flu, and other infectious diseases that are spreading across the United States.
On the December 11 episode of the podcast The Weekly Show With Jon Stewart, guest Tim Miller of The Bulwark said there have to be at least two people at fellow guest Jon Favreau’s workplace wearing masks because it’s a progressive organization. Stewart responded, “There’s always two, and you always say, ‘Oh, are you sick?’ And they go, ‘Uh, I don’t want to talk about it.'”
Disappointed to see Jon Stewart & co joke about masking in public. I do it for my medically fragile daughter (Batten Disease). People not masking properly led to her getting pneumonia, which led to her being on life support, which led to me getting price quotes on her cremation just in case.
— Philip Palermo (@palermo.bsky.social) December 28, 2025 at 7:31 PM
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First of all, asking people why they are masking is invasive behavior. No one randomly owes you information about their health, their loved one’s health, or, understandably, just wanting to avoid Covid, which is the only way to prevent Long Covid. As I’ve also previously reported, disabled people in New York’s Nassau County have reported being harassed after the county passed a mask ban. Cancer patients have also told their stories of being questioned about why they’re masking. Even before the start of the Covid pandemic, populations including cancer patients and organ transplant recipients have been encouraged to mask by healthcare professionals.
“Sad that Jon Stewart and friends have become just more white liberals who enjoy punching down at marginalized people who are just doing our best to survive,” Karistina Lafae, a disabled author and essayist, told me. “Those of us who have Long COVID, who have watched family and friends die of COVID, we are being mocked for taking common-sense precautions against illness and further disability.”
Research also shows that Long Covid is very much a working-class problem. A study looking at people in Spain found that workers who had close contact with colleagues at their job, did not mask, and took public transit to and from work are more likely to have Long Covid, thus also highlighting Covid as an occupational problem. The United States Census Bureau also reported in 2023 that Black and Latino adults were more likely to report experiencing Long Covid symptoms than white people.
Some people have also pointed out the hypocrisy of his work supporting 9/11 first responders and how he is talking about masking now. Epidemiologist Gabrielle A. Perry posted on BlueSky that Stewart has “some absolute fucking NERVE to be making fun of Long COVID survivors and people still masking” when “he’s seen UP CLOSE the government deny healthcare and resources for 9/11 survivors who breathed in toxic air and are suffering decades later.”
Jon Stewart has some absolute fucking NERVE to be making fun of Long COVID survivors and people still masking on his piece of shit podcast when he’s seen UP CLOSE the government deny healthcare and resources for 9/11 survivors who breathed in toxic air and are suffering decades later. What a psycho
— Gabrielle A. Perry, MPH (@geauxgabrielle.bsky.social) December 27, 2025 at 5:29 AM
Justine Barron worked a few blocks from the World Trade Center in 2001. “On top of exposure that day, I was exposed for a year and developed extremely severe breathing and skin issues, as well as immune dysfunction,” Barron told me. Barron acquired Long Covid in 2020, and her doctors believe that her 9/11-related conditions made her more susceptible to developing Long Covid.
Barron is part of a 25-year World Trade Center Health Commission study, including hundreds of thousands of participants. “More recently, there have been questions related to Covid and Long Covid indicating that the commission is also aware of this connection,” Barron said. “My point is that you can’t be supportive of the 9/11 responders without also being supportive of Long Covid. Both environmental harms cause similar issues in people, and there are many of us that are double victims.”
2025-12-30 00:41:37
The man who allegedly planted two pipe bombs in Washington, DC, the night before the January 6 Capitol riot told investigators after his arrest earlier this month that someone needed to “speak up” for people who believed that the 2020 election was stolen, according to a court filing on Sunday.
Federal prosecutors said that the defendant, Brian Cole, felt “extreme acts of violence” were necessary as Cole told them he placed the bombs near the RNC and DNC headquarters because “they were in charge.”
The bombs were not discovered until the afternoon of January 6 and did not detonate. Following his arrest this December, Cole initially denied making or planting the bombs but later confessed to transporting and planting two improvised explosive devices when presented with evidence of himself on surveillance video. In the filing, the Justice Department requested that Cole be detained until his trial, as his offense is listed as a federal terrorism crime.
Cole told investigators that although he “has never really been an openly political person,” he felt “like something was wrong” in the 2020 election and began following discussions on YouTube and Reddit. He said that “the people up top,” including “people on both sides, public figures,” should not “ignore people’s grievances” or call them “conspiracy theorists,” “bad people,” “Nazis,” or “fascists.”
“If people feel that their votes are like just being thrown away, then…at the very least someone should address it,” Cole was quoted as telling investigators.
These events came as Trump repeatedly lied about winning the presidential election.
Cole denied that his actions were “directed toward Congress or related to the proceedings scheduled to take place on January 6.” The election was being certified that day when rioters stormed the Capitol building, halting the count of Electoral College ballots.
According to the court filing, Cole bought many items needed to construct the bombs between 2018 and 2020. He told investigators that the idea to use pipe bombs came from his interest in the Troubles, a three-decade conflict in Northern Ireland beginning in the 1960s over whether it would remain within the United Kingdom or unite with Ireland as a single state. Bombings of public places, including detonating pipe bombs, were common.
Cole drove about 25 miles to Washington from his home in Woodbridge, Virginia, on January 5, 2021, with the bombs. He said that he planted them at night because he did not want to kill or seriously injure people and was “pretty relieved” that they did not detonate.
“Ultimately, it was luck, not lack of effort, that the defendant failed to detonate one or both of his devices and that no one was killed or maimed due to his actions,” Assistant US Attorney Charles Jones wrote in the filing. “His failure to accomplish his objectives does not mitigate the profoundly dangerous nature of his crimes.”
Jones highlighted that “the Vice President-elect and Speaker of the House,” as well as law enforcement, first responders, and political leaders, drove by the pipe bombs before they were discovered.
2025-12-29 03:13:59
Kara Swisher, the veteran tech journalist who had a leading hand in uncovering the affair between then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and journalist Olivia Nuzzi, said in a Friday interview that RFK Jr. also needs to be held accountable given his long history as a “predator.”
“It’s crazy that people don’t care,” Swisher said, regarding how his well-documented allegations of sexual misconduct didn’t impact his confirmation as secretary of health and human services. “It’s because he’s lying about it.”
Eliza Cooney, a former babysitter for the Kennedy family, said that RFK Jr. sexually assaulted her when she was 23 years old and he was 45.
Kennedy reportedly sent a text to Cooney that deflected responsibility: “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable…If I hurt you, it was inadvertent.”
Before he was confirmed, his cousin Caroline Kennedy wrote to several Congress members that they shouldn’t approve his nomination, calling him a “predator” that was “unqualified” for the job.
“He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience,” she said. “His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed.”
RFK Jr. also appeared in Jeffrey Epstein flight records released in 2024.
But he was confirmed anyway.
“He’s murdering people with the vaccine stuff,” Swisher also told Miller.
The CDC voted earlier this month to limit hepatitis B vaccines for newborns, rolling back over 30 years of evidence that the vaccine lowers the probability of liver diseases caused by the virus. Models project that delaying the vaccine from birth to two months could lead to at least 1,400 infections and 480 deaths every year.
The detrimental impact of RFK Jr.’s confirmation is obvious, but as Nina Martin noted in our Heroes and Monsters series this month, Swisher is correct—not just about Nuzzi but also how men in power like RFK Jr. continue to go unpunished.
