The Second Most Dangerous Man In America Has A Drug Problem And His Boss Is Fine With It.
RFK Jr. claims forty years of sobriety while allegedly smoking DMT, denies taking steroids while injecting testosterone, and writes poetry so bad it should be a federal crime.
It is breathtaking to watch Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stand before the American people as Secretary of Health and Human Services—a man with no medical degree, no public health training, no clinical experience of any kind—and lecture the nation on wellness while preventable disease, once controlled, burn across the United States.
The appointment was always an outrage. That it has become a catastrophe was entirely predictable.
When Donald Trump nominated Kennedy to lead HHS, the warning signs were not subtle. Here was a man who had spent two decades peddling the thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism—a theory demolished by more than forty studies across seven countries involving 5.6 million people. Here was a man who, in his 2021 book ‘The Real Anthony Fauci,’ questioned whether HIV actually causes AIDS, resurrecting the discredited theories of Peter Duesberg that the scientific community buried decades ago. The Nobel Prize for discovering that HIV causes AIDS was awarded in 2008. Kennedy apparently missed the news.
But Trump, ever the transactional operator, saw in Kennedy something more valuable than competence: a celebrity defector from the Democratic coalition, a famous name that could be bartered for political advantage. That Kennedy’s views on public health were dangerous nonsense was apparently immaterial. The deal was the thing.
And so America got its experiment in government-by-contrarian. The results are now bleeding into the public record in the most literal sense possible.
The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed over 2,000 measles cases in 2025—the highest annual total in more than thirty years. Fifty outbreaks across forty-three states. Three deaths, including two unvaccinated children in Texas. Whooping cough cases have exploded by more than 1,500 percent since 2021, killing infants in Louisiana, Washington, Idaho, South Dakota, and Oregon. The share of U.S. counties with kindergarten vaccination rates sufficient to prevent outbreaks has collapsed from fifty percent before the pandemic to just twenty-eight percent today. Fewer than half of Americans have received a flu shot this season.
These are not abstractions. These are children in hospital beds, struggling to breathe. These are infants too young to be vaccinated, infected by the willfully unprotected.
And what has Secretary Kennedy done in response? Under his leadership, the CDC revised its website to cast doubt on the settled science of vaccine safety. His handpicked advisory panel voted to limit access to the combined measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine. They voted to end the decades-old federal recommendation that all infants receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. The man supposedly protecting American health is instead undermining it, guided by conspiracy theories and personal conviction rather than science and evidence.
But the revelations keep coming, and they paint a portrait of a man whose relationship with truth is, at best, casual—and whose personal conduct suggests the rules he would impose on others simply do not apply to him.
Kennedy has long claimed forty years of sobriety from his well-documented addictions, which began at age fifteen. It was a redemption narrative, and America loves those. Yet Olivia Nuzzi’s recent book ‘American Canto’—written by a journalist who, whatever her ethical failures, had unusual access to Kennedy—alleges that he continues to use DMT, a Schedule I controlled substance. She reveals that some of their conversations occurred while Kennedy was on DMT. Medical experts are unequivocal: people with histories of substance use disorder should not use psychedelics outside controlled clinical settings with professional supervision.
Kennedy, if these allegations are true, is not merely lying about his sobriety. He is engaging in precisely the kind of reckless behavior that addiction specialists warn can trigger relapse.
Then there is the testosterone. Kennedy has openly admitted to taking testosterone replacement therapy as part of what he calls an ‘anti-aging protocol.’ He has also declared, with apparent conviction, ‘I don’t take any anabolic steroids.’ This is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of science and federal law. Anyone who took 9th grade biology knows testosterone is an steroid. Under the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, testosterone is classified as an anabolic steroid. The FDA has explicitly not approved testosterone for anti-aging use, warning that ‘the safety and benefits of this use have not been established.’ Kennedy is either ignorant of basic pharmacology and federal drug classification—alarming in a Health Secretary—or he is lying to the American public about his drug use. Neither option recommends him for the position he holds.
The man now promising to rewrite America’s dietary guidelines to ‘stress the need to eat saturated fats, dairy, good meat’ is contradicting decades of cardiovascular research. The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fat to six percent of daily calories. More than eighty percent of Americans already exceed the ten percent threshold. Kennedy’s guidance, if implemented, would be a gift to the cardiology industry. ‘Science is under attack,’ Stanford nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner has observed. He is being polite. Science is not merely under attack. It has been handed over to a man who denies its most basic findings and calls his denial enlightenment.
If the allegations surrounding Kennedy’s drug use and scientific illiteracy strike you as insufficiently baroque, allow me to introduce you to the source material—and the delightfully tawdry circumstances through which it came to light. Because the Nuzzi affair, as it has come to be known, is not merely a tabloid scandal. It is a window into how powerful men operate when they believe the rules do not apply to them—and it reveals Kennedy to be cut from precisely the same cloth as the man who appointed him. The man whose chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is on the record saying he has an “alcoholic personality.”
Olivia Nuzzi was thirty-two years old when she profiled Kennedy for New York magazine in November 2023. Kennedy was seventy-one, married to his third wife, the actress Cheryl Hines. What followed, according to Nuzzi’s memoir and the explosive Substack revelations of her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, was a months-long ‘emotional and digital’ relationship that obliterated every boundary between journalist and subject. Nuzzi insists the relationship was never physical, merely ‘emotional and digital in nature.’ Kennedy, for his part, denies everything, claiming he met Nuzzi exactly once for an interview that produced ‘a hit piece.’
One suspects the truth lies somewhere in the vicinity of the alleged sexts, the nude photographs Nuzzi reportedly sent, and the erotic poetry Kennedy allegedly dispatched in return.
Ah yes, the poetry. I wrote about this previously, but for those who didn’t read it then, here’s a treat.
Kennedy, Nuzzi has written, was the first to say ‘I love you.’ He called her by a series of affectionate nicknames. He allegedly told her he wanted to ‘possess’ and ‘control’ her, and expressed his desire to impregnate her—a claim that Lizza corroborated, adding that Kennedy appeared to have what he delicately termed a ‘pregnancy fetish.’ He promised, with the grandiosity that seems to run in the family, that he would ‘take a bullet for her.’ And then there were the verses. According to Lizza, Kennedy wrote to Nuzzi: ‘Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest. Drink from me Love. 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.’
Walt Whitman, he is not.
Kennedy, naturally, denies everything. This is the same defense playbook we have seen before: deny, deny, deny, and attack the credibility of anyone who says otherwise. Where have we seen this before? Donald Trump, of course, wrote that playbook. The Access Hollywood tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women by their genitals, was dismissed as ‘locker room talk.’ The more than two dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct are, in his telling, all liars. E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing, was someone he claimed never to have met—until photographs proved otherwise. The hush money payments to Stormy Daniels were denied until they couldn’t be, and then reframed as perfectly legal.
Kennedy operates in the same moral universe. Both men share a sense of entitlement that extends to women’s bodies. Both deny everything until confronted with evidence, and then deny the evidence. Both have left wreckage in their wake—marriages destroyed, careers ruined, reputations shattered—while emerging largely unscathed themselves. Both are on their third marriage. Both have treated their wedding vows as suggestions rather than commitments. And now both are running the federal government.
Which brings us to Ryan Lizza, who has transformed his romantic humiliation into a subscription-based content empire with a speed that would impress even the most hardened media entrepreneur. The scandal itself has become a kind of dark comedy, a media ouroboros in which journalists consume each other for content. Lizza, fifty-one, was Nuzzi’s fiancé when the Kennedy affair began. He is himself no stranger to controversy—he was the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker until his 2017 departure amid allegations of ‘improper sexual conduct,’ allegations he disputed but which the magazine found credible enough for termination. He subsequently landed at Politico, where he served as chief Washington correspondent while engaged to Nuzzi, with whom he had contracted to write a book about the 2024 presidential campaign.
That book will not be written. What Lizza has written instead is ‘Telos,’ a Substack publication that launched in early 2025 with the stated purpose of covering ‘the crisis in Washington.’ The crisis Lizza seems most interested in covering, however, is the one that unfolded in his Georgetown townhouse. Lizza discovered the Kennedy affair in August 2024. What he did next was unprecedented in the annals of journalistic revenge: he began publishing a serialized account of his fiancée’s betrayal. The newsletter is now ranked thirty-second in the United States. His breakup has become a profit center. Mediaite memorably described his posts as ‘revenge porn disguised as journalism.’
But Lizza’s revelations went beyond Kennedy. In the very first installment, he dropped a twist worthy of a prestige television finale: this was not, it turned out, Nuzzi’s first affair with a politician she was covering. In 2020, Lizza claimed, he discovered that Nuzzi had been sleeping with Mark Sanford—the former South Carolina governor who famously told his staff he was ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail’ when he was actually in Argentina with his mistress. Sanford, who ran a failed campaign for the 2020 Republican nomination, had been the subject of a Nuzzi profile for New York magazine.
The irony is thick: Nuzzi allegedly had an affair with a man famous for lying about an affair, then allegedly had another affair with a man who lies about everything. One begins to detect a pattern. The Appalachian Trail, it seems, runs through Georgetown.
Lizza’s subsequent posts made increasingly grave accusations. He claimed Nuzzi had crossed from journalist to ‘private political operative’ for Kennedy, sharing opposition research with his campaign. She had, he alleged, ‘caught and killed’ an embarrassing story from a campaign whistleblower by convincing the source to remain loyal—and then revealing the source’s identity to Kennedy himself. She had written Kennedy a political strategy memo while simultaneously working on her devastating assessment of Joe Biden’s mental acuity for New York magazine. Lizza has published what he claims is that memo. ‘Olivia had essentially become a private political operative for Bobby Kennedy,’ Lizza wrote, ‘while publicly posing as a hard-nosed reporter.’
Nuzzi, through her lawyer, has called Lizza’s posts ‘fiction-slash-revenge porn’ and accused him of a sixteen-month ‘harassment campaign.’ She sought a restraining order against him in 2024, alleging he hacked her devices, stalked her, and threatened to destroy her career—accusations Lizza denies. The restraining order was eventually dropped.
Meanwhile, Lizza’s Substack has climbed to number thirty-two in the United States, proving that there is no catastrophe in American life that cannot be monetized. Much of his most explosive content sits behind a paywall, which critics have noted raises questions about whether his motivations are journalistic integrity or profit. When your breakup becomes a revenue stream, the distinction between accountability and vengeance grows murky indeed. In his Substack, Lizza quotes the Buddha on the perils of anger. One suspects the Buddha did not anticipate subscription newsletters.
Nuzzi’s memoir ‘American Canto,’ released in December 2025, was supposed to be her version of events. It has not gone well. Critics savaged it. The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis declared, ‘A tell-all memoir? Ha. This is a tell-nothing memoir.’ The book languished at number 6,094 on Amazon’s bestseller list—below ‘Sewing Pattern Drafting and Design.’ Vanity Fair, which had hired Nuzzi as its West Coast editor and excerpted the book, announced it was ‘reviewing its relationship’ with her after Lizza’s allegations about Mark Sanford emerged. Days later, Nuzzi left the magazine.
In a particularly mordant Substack post titled "Signs Your Book Rollout Has Gone Awry," Nuzzi offered a list that included: "Monica Lewinsky reaches out to check on your mental health." When the woman who survived the most infamous sex scandal in modern presidential history thinks your situation warrants a welfare check, things have gone very wrong indeed.
One almost feels sorry for her—almost—until one remembers the stakes. In her book, Nuzzi admits Kennedy told her he loved her, wanted to ‘possess’ and ‘control’ her, and expressed his desire to impregnate her. She also reveals that some of their conversations occurred while Kennedy was on DMT. And yet, when Kennedy faced his confirmation hearings in January 2025, Nuzzi—who possessed information suggesting the incoming Health Secretary was using illegal hallucinogens—said nothing.
During a December 2025 interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, when asked why she withheld this information about a man who was about to oversee America’s health agencies, Nuzzi began to cry and asked to pause the interview. ‘I’ve written about this in my book,’ she repeated, as though publishing allegations months after they might have mattered constitutes journalism rather than commerce.
A book that came out after Kennedy was confirmed. A book that costs twenty-eight dollars. A book that ranks below sewing patterns on Amazon.
The information that America’s Health Secretary allegedly smokes illegal psychedelics was, apparently, available only to those willing to pay for Nuzzi’s memoir or subscribe to Lizza’s Substack. The citizens whose health Kennedy now oversees had to wait.
What are we to make of this spectacular wreckage? Here we have three people—a Kennedy scion turned conspiracy theorist who allegedly sexted a journalist while tripping on DMT; a young reporter whose career was built on access to powerful men and who allegedly slept with at least two of her profile subjects; and a veteran Washington correspondent whose own #MeToo moment was followed by an engagement to a woman nineteen years his junior, now monetizing her betrayal one Substack post at a time.
The details that emerged from this sordid triangle—Kennedy’s alleged drug use, his crude poetry, his apparent belief that rules apply to everyone but himself—might have been useful information for the Senate during his confirmation hearings. Instead, they dribbled out across competing memoirs and revenge Substacks, weaponized for book sales and subscription revenue rather than public accountability. And somewhere, Mark Sanford is probably grateful that ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail’ is no longer the most embarrassing euphemism in American politics. In Washington, even the scandals have scandals.
What does it tell us that both Trump and Kennedy treat women as conquests to be denied, that both lie reflexively about matters large and small, that both believe accountability is for lesser men? It tells us that character matters, and that we are governed by men who have none.
Even if we take Nuzzi at her word that the relationship was never physical, Kennedy was a seventy-one-year-old married man sending love poetry to a woman thirty-nine years his junior while she was supposed to be covering him objectively. His wife, Cheryl Hines, has remained largely silent (MAGA feminism in action - ignore your cheating spouse and get your lips filled).
This is not the behavior of a man we should trust with America’s health. This is not the behavior of a man we should trust with anything.
Which brings up the harder question, the one that requires looking beyond Kennedy to the man who put him there. Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not an aberration. It was a declaration. It announced that expertise is negotiable, that qualifications are beside the point, that any position in the federal government can be traded for political advantage regardless of the consequences to the Americans that government is meant to serve.
Trump knew who Kennedy was. Everyone knew. The anti-vaccine activism was not a secret. The AIDS denialism was in print. The fringe theories about food and medicine were readily available to anyone with an internet connection. Trump nominated him anyway, because he wanted the endorsement, wanted the name, and wanted RFK Jr. out of the race. Everyone knew that if RFK Jr. ran as an independent he’d pull votes from him.
This is not governance. It is barter, conducted with American lives as the currency.
The evidence is now overwhelming. Kennedy lacks the training, the judgment, and apparently the honesty to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services. His policies are not merely ineffective; they are actively causing harm. Children are dying of diseases we eliminated a generation ago. The man responsible for protecting public health is instead undermining it, guided by conspiracy theories and personal conviction rather than science and evidence.
He must be removed.
But removal of Kennedy alone is insufficient. The deeper rot is in the judgment that placed him there. A president who would compromise the health of American children for a political endorsement has demonstrated unfitness for the office he holds. A president who would install a man with no qualifications and dangerous views atop the agency responsible for the nation’s health has shown us exactly what he values, and it is not the American people.
©2026 All Rights Reserved. Joshua Powell & The Powell House Press
Contact: Josh@thepowellhousepress.com
Evil, just like Trump and any one Trump picks, you know they have to be rotten to work for him and do anything he tells them