BREAKING: The 3rd part of Ryan Lizza's Olivia Nuzzi saga is live

Part 3: Catch and Kill
telos.news/p/part-3-catch…
"One night in early August 2024, before I knew anything, Olivia Nuzzi became obsessed with obtaining an advance copy of an article that The New Yorker was set to publish the following day. Olivia was desperate to get a preview of a profile of Bobby Kennedy Jr. by Clare Malone, a political reporter whom Olivia viewed as a competitor.

"The piece included a killer anecdote, one of the most memorable of the presidential campaign, and which would come to define Bobby’s image for much of the public: A decade earlier, he had left the carcass of a black-bear cub in Central Park as some kind of twisted prank.

"This was precisely the sort of story that Olivia relished, a Twin Peaks-like tale that illuminated the darker parts of a candidate’s mind. Olivia had written one of the earliest profiles of Bobby, so I figured her fixation on getting The New Yorker piece was also about professional jealousy. Bobby was her subject. Now she had missed a major scoop about the candidate whom, behind the scenes and without much explanation, she insisted would be the next president.

"What I didn’t know at the time was that she was secretly working to help make Bobby the next president." Ryan Lizza catalogues Olivia Nuzzi's catch-and-kill effort for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.):

"And [@OliviaNuzzi] didn’t want to get her hands on that @NewYorker profile because she envied Clare Malone’s bear scoop. In fact, I later learned, she already had it. Olivia had heard the strange story from a confidential source. But instead of writing it herself and owning what would become one of the most infamous stories of 2024, or handing it off to a colleague at @NYMag, Olivia outed the source to Bobby [Kennedy] and told him everything she had learned. Together they plotted ways to kill it, or, at the very least, get ahead of it. (Bobby eventually pre-empted Clare’s piece with a video about the bear story after a New Yorker fact-checker called him.)

"As she later revealed to me during hours of conversations, Olivia did this regularly throughout 2024: canvassing sources who trusted her, obtaining their opposition research on Bobby, and then feeding it directly to the candidate."
telos.news/p/part-3-catch…

VACCINE NEWS: A pair of Cochrane Review papers provide the strongest evidence to date that the HPV vaccine is very safe and highly effective.

Girls who are vaccinated before age 16 have an 80 percent lower risk of cervical cancer.

HHS secretary RFK Jr has disparaged the HPV vax, calling it dangerous. This rigorous analysis of numerous studies finds considerable evidence to the contrary. The vaccine was not associated with serious adverse effects and instead was only associated with mild effects, like a sore arm after the injection.

The papers:

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination for the prevention of cervical cancer and other HPV-related diseases: a network meta-analysis 
cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10…

Effects of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programmes on community rates of HPV-related disease and harms from vaccination cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10… The Cochrane review pored over a huge amount of safety data and found that serious adverse health events were rare and occurred at the same rate regardless of whether people received the vaccine or a placebo.

BREAKING: Ryan Lizza has issued Part 2 of his saga with Olivia Nuzzi:

She did it again.

It was four years later. Another presidential campaign. Another book project. Another candidate whom she had profiled. Another note—a poem, according to Olivia—though this time from the candidate to her.

“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.”

telos.news/p/part-2-she-d… "Olivia [Nuzzi] insisted that she and Mark [Sanford] only had sex one time, on the night of February 24, 2020, after she arrived at his home at about 7 PM. During their encounter, he was paranoid that she was taping him, so she briefly turned her phone’s recorder on and off to show him how it worked, leaving behind a short voice memo of the two of them giggling. She left his house around 11 PM."

The Growing Divide in the Rainbow Coalition

More gay people are speaking out against the gender ideology of trans and queer activists, by Pamela Paul for @WSJ. Gift link: wsj.com/us-news/the-gr…

Update: The Texas doctor sued by Ken Paxton for allegedly prescribing gender-transition drugs to minors after the state’s ban went into effect has surrendered her medical license. She had written the prescriptions under the diagnosis “endocrine disorder not otherwise specified.” From Oct 2024: open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…

NEWS: Trans and nonbinary identities are indeed in free-fall in college age Americans.

Prof. Jean Twenge @jean_twenge found new survey data that supports @epkaufm's much disputed claim from last week.

Twenge also found data indicating that trans identity increased exponentially by birth year until those born after about 2002. These identities have plummeted in those born more recently—who are now 20 to 23 years old.

The problem with Kaufman's data is it didn't distinguish between trans and nonbinary identities. The data that Twenge found does.

The decline in such identities in younger Americans raises important questions about the future of the field of pediatric gender medicine and the question of whether these identities are at least partially driven by social influences, as opposed to immutable, inborn traits.


@jean_twenge @epkaufm Check out @Jean_Twenge's blog: generationtechblog.com/p/trans-identi…

Pressured by Transgender Activists, Star Academic Backs Out Of His Own Research

I report for @NewYorkSun: By imperiling a paper on gender-transition interventions for youths, evidence-based medicine expert Dr. Gordon Guyatt joins a wider suppressive trend seen in academic publishing in pediatric gender medicine. LINK: Pressured by Transgender Activists, Star Academic Backs Out Of His Own Research

By imperilling a paper on gender-transition interventions for youths, evidence-based medicine expert Dr. Gordon Guyatt joins a wider suppressive trend seen in academic publishing in pediatric gender medicine.nysun.com/article/pressu…

NEWS: ABC Pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Indefinitely After Host’s Charlie Kirk Comments

Disney’s ABC said it would take Jimmy Kimmel‘s popular late-night show off its schedule “indefinitely” after one of the biggest owners of TV stations in the U.S., Nexstar Media, said it would pre-empt airings of the program following remarks the host made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

In his monologue Monday night , Kimmel said that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points off Kirk’s murder. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, was shot and killed Sept. 10 at a debate at Utah Valley University. Three days later, authorities announced they had arrested the suspected shooter.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said.

Nexstar said Wednesday that its “owned and partner television stations affiliated with the ABC Television Network will preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for the foreseeable future, beginning with tonight’s show.” The company said it  “strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.” variety.com/2025/tv/news/n…

Update: Now The Guardian has cut from this article about Tyler Robinson the quote from the unnamed high school friend about his being “leftist”.

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1966620670634381628

I would very much like to know whether the unnamed source got cold feet and demanded a retraction of his quote (and if so, why), or if his words and his capacity to recall a time from about six or seven years ago were somehow misrepresented in the first place.

I report for @UnHerd on the tangled and tortured case of Gordon Guyatt, the towering figure of evidence-based medicine who has caved to transgender-activist pressure and thrown under the bus the funder of his systematic reviews of pediatric gender-transition treatment, @SEGM_EBM. He and his colleagues also contradicted their own research findings by adopting activist language touting the benefits of these interventions as “medically necessary.”

My reporting plumbs the depths of the internal tensions at McMaster University, where Guyatt is a star professor, over the mounting activist pressure. I spoke with one of the authors of the review papers, who was sharply critical of Guyatt’s decision to take sides on how his work should be used in the policy arena. This source shared with me internal emails diagramming the thought process of Guyatt and one of his key McMaster colleagues as they tried to quell the furor over their commissioned work for SEGM.

I also report on how Guyatt’s team is seeking to sink or at least divorce themselves from two other systematic reviews about youth gender medicine, and also kill an analysis of @WPATH’s trans care guidelines. unherd.com/2025/09/the-ta…

I interviewed a number of the first monkeypox (mpox) cases in 2022. They were largely affluent gay men who enjoyed traveling around the world and going to sex parties. I am not certain how stigma is connected to such a pastime.

During the outbreak, the CDC downplayed how central sex between men was to driving the outbreak. Dr. Daskalakis in particular invariably led with the exceptions to the rule of who was at risk, such as by uttering the misleading slogan, “Anybody can get monkeypox.” I once challenged him on this fact during a press call in August 2022 and asked why he wasn’t instead being direct and clear that gay men were overwhelmingly the ones at risk. He responded by saying he thought he and the CDC were doing a fantastic job.

Meanwhile, I was constantly getting DMs from parents who were scared to send their kids back to school or to daycare, despite the fact that their children were literally at greater risk of being struck by lightning than getting mpox.

Many people were angry that summer that some of the same people who insisted on masking children or keeping everyone at home during Covid were now insisting that gay men should not be asked to take a break from sex with multiple partners. It is evident that this contradiction eroded trust in public health, as you can see here from what @steveguest is saying: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…

Nearly 40 percent of students at Brown University identify as something other than straight. The growth has been largely among students identifying as bisexual or as queer, pansexual, asexual or questioning. There has been little growth in gay identity. browndailyherald.com/article/2023/0…

Mother Jones is re-upping this article from January. The study in question found that, among minors with private health insurance, by age 17, about 1 in 1,000 were on cross-sex hormones during 2018 to 2023. The rate was higher than that for natal girls and was likely higher overall by 2023. One way of reporting this news is to simply provide readers with the figures and let them decide whether they represent a little or a lot. open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…

The Advocate reports: "Asked whether a parent concerned about their child facing a trans kid in girls’ sports 'has a case,' Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg said, “Sure.” But he rejected blanket policies like the federal bans being enacted by the Trump administration, saying, “These decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn.”

This statement has inspired a blistering response on Bleuskie—see the 🧵⬇️ Journalist Walter Bragman issues a blistering response to @PeteButtigieg’s statement over trans inclusion in sports, calling it “craven shit” and saying Mr. Buttigieg is catering to bigots.

“To just put a fine point on it: Parents do not, in fact, have legitimate concerns about trans kids playing sports,” Mr. Bragman says.

“Just because they believe bullshit doesn’t make it legitimate.

“Fuck anti-trans bigots.”

Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones, says that it is for the best that JD Vance’s children be subjected to boos at Disneyland, so that they “know now what their father is about.” Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes also endorses the jeers at @JDVance’s family at Disneyland.

Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

The party’s vanguard position got ahead of voters in 2024, and the internal debate now underway reveals an uncertainty on how to adapt, by @chashomans for @nytimes.

"Stuck in a widening gulf between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy organizations on one side, and those of the broader American electorate on the other, many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about the subject. In surveys, Ms. Erickson and other public-opinion researchers had found that this allowed Republicans, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democrats on transgender rights in 2024, to define voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy positions." nytimes.com/2025/07/13/us/…

Dr. Rachel Levine, a former Biden administration health official, tells @TheAdvocateMag that "the evidence base is strong for the safety and efficacy" of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in minors.

A slew of systematic literature reviews have found this is not the case. Instead, they have found that the relevant evidence is weak and inconclusive. They have suggested that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health erred in making strong recommendations for these treatments. Evidence-based medicine guidelines discourage making a strong recommendation based on weak evidence. Despite subpoenaed email records showing that Dr. Rachel Levine pushed WPATH to remove age limits on pediatric gender-transition treatments and surgeries for political reasons, Dr. Levine denied ever having done so in an interview with @TheAdvocate.

Fact checking Michael Hobbes

Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes has a new episode of his podcast If Books Could Kill, about the US v. Skrmetti Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee's ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment.

In this🧵I will fact check Hobbes:
⬇️ Here is a link to the podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

If, for the sake of argument, no one can prove that pediatric gender-transition treatment prevents suicide death only because such deaths are so rare, then why has this treatment been sold, first and foremost, as “lifesaving”?

Why have people who have called that claim into question been savagely attacked and sidelined?

Marci Bowers, former head of WPATH, herself told me last year that suicide death has never been a good metric of the success of this treatment.
Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes is himself one of the prime sources of misinformation about pediatric gender-transition treatment. He has routinely falsely claimed that there is no evidence that children get these drugs after absent or cursory assessment periods. There is copious evidence that this happens routinely at some of the top gender clinics in the nation. Despite all this evidence, Hobbes has never acknowledged his fault.

But you can see here that he is combining his longstanding claim about assessments with a claim about what he characterizes as false claims that there are large numbers of kids getting these drugs. That question should not necessarily be conflated with the assessment question.

About 1 in 1,000 youth with private health insurance went on cross sex hormones by age 17 between 2018 and 2022. That number was higher for natal girls and was probably higher for all youth by the end of that period.

One thing that has concerned some people is not necessarily the number of kids getting these drugs, but the rate of increase of that number. They have been concerned over where that figure might end up.

The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine

How the left ended up disbelieving the science

By @HelenLewis for @TheAtlantic theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

The Bleuskie crowd is livid over Andrew Sullivan’s Times opinion essay about LGBTQ activism: 🧵

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1938294607852212616