The child murdering failson, his ratfucker, and the editors who loved them

RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines only continues to escalate as children continue to get sick and die. His disastrous leadership will inflict damage that will take decades to fix (at best.) And unlike a lot of the bad things Trump has done, it was probably evitable.

We don’t know for certain, but it’s significant that both RFK Jr. and Olivia Nuzzi themselves believed that if anything like the full story of their affair and her aggressive attempts to suppress coverage of it (while she was writing widely discussed hatchet jobs on Biden and puff pieces about Trump) it would cost RFK Jr. his chance of a cabinet appointment. And this is very plausible — Trump had no longstanding connection to RFK Jr. or the anti-vaxx movement, and an extensive history of dumping people who make him look bad in the eyes of the press.

A question I have always had is how the media organizations that “investigated” this scandal, or the ones that did barely disguised PR campaigns for her unreadable book, managed to miss the extent of Nuzzi’s misconduct when it wouldn’t have been terribly difficult to uncover. The both highly dismaying and not entirely surprising answer is “they knew and they didn’t give a shit:”

Given the scale of the Kennedy-Nuzzi scandal, the question I’ve been asked most frequently is, “Why didn’t you tell anyone about all of this when it could have mattered?”

Maybe it could have changed the election.

Maybe it could have affected Kennedy’s confirmation.

Maybe it could have prevented several major media companies from hiring, publishing, and promoting the work of a journalist who crossed such serious ethical lines.

I’ve already explained, in excruciating detail, what happened to prevent the story from being told before the 2024 election.

But what about after that? Many of you have asked me what happened after Nuzzi was forced to withdraw her false claims in D.C. Superior Court on November 8, and I returned to Politico as its Chief Washington Correspondent.

Politico never ran an article about any of this. Why didn’t I tell Politico’s editors about what I knew, which would have been a sensational story for Politico to investigate and publish?

The answer is that I told Politico’s top editor everything.

After its investigation of Nuzzi, New York magazine issued a statement absolving her of wrongdoing. Why, given what I knew, didn’t I tell New York about Nuzzi’s journalistic fraud?

The answer is that I told a senior editorial staffer at New York everything.

Simon & Schuster allowed American Canto out into the world without basic vetting. I had a working relationship with the editor and publisher of Avid Reader, the imprint that published the book. Why didn’t I tell one of them what I knew?

The answer is that I told the publisher everything.

To help promote her book and her return to journalism, The New York Times published a puff piece on Nuzzi, accompanied by a glamorous video and photo essay. Political reporters at the Times, several of whom knew the real story, told me they were appalled by the article, which was eviscerated by Times readers as “hagiography,” “a toothless examination,” and “a fashion shoot” serving as “clickbait.” But I was quoted in the article, so why didn’t I tell the reporter what I knew, which could have saved him and the newspaper from embarrassment?

The answer is that I told the Times reporter who wrote the article everything.

Mark Guiducci, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and his superiors at Condé Nast, hired Nuzzi as an editor and published a widely panned excerpt from her book without conducting basic due diligence about this scandal. The magazine claimed it was “taken by surprise” by the revelations of Nuzzi’s journalistic malfeasance. Shouldn’t they have known better?

The answer is, yes, they should have.

Nuzzi was a star in the Beltway media, for various reasons. RFK Jr is, after all, a Kennedy, and one who might have some bad ideas but taps into a lot of people’s prejudices by making health entirely about individual choices. They’re made people, and were (and in RFK Jr,’s case, still are) getting sanewashed and rationalized by too much of the elite media. Everybody that dies because of RFK Jr.’s destruction of public health in America is fully on everybody who was in a position to do the right thing and didn’t when it mattered.