RFK Jr.’s Own Family Calls on Him to Resign After Train-Wreck Hearing

During and after his Thursday train-wreck Senate hearing, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has faced growing calls to resign. Now his own family is joining that chorus.

On Thursday, Kennedy flailed as he was grilled on his actions at the Department of Health and Human Services, such as his anti-vaccine agenda and mismanagement of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Democratic lawmakers, top American medical groups, and more than 1,000 current and former HHS personnel have called for Kennedy’s termination.

Joining them, former Representative Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts, the health secretary’s nephew, took to X Friday, calling his uncle “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American,” who has chosen to “dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.”

“None of us will be spared the pain he is inflicting. It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are or what state you live in—the heartbreak of watching a loved one fall ill knows no borders,” Kennedy wrote. “The challenges before us—from disease outbreaks to mental health crises—demand moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact. Those values are not present in the Secretary’s office. He must resign.”

This is not the first time members of the Kennedy family have condemned RFK Jr.—with his long-shot presidential campaign and, later, his endorsement of Trump both drawing public objections from his family. During his confirmation process, his cousin Caroline Kennedy urged the Senate to reject his nomination, writing that the American public “deserve[s] better than Bobby Kennedy.” During Thursday’s hearing, John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg (RFK Jr.’s first cousin once removed) posted on X, “RFK LOSER is choking so badly LIVE.”

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, seems to be taking orders from notorious far-right hate account “Libs of TikTok.”

On Thursday afternoon, Libs of TikTok tagged Hegseth in a post targeting a military doctor whose LinkedIn page listed her title as the “EMF-Bravo Navy Deputy Medical Director for Transgender Healthcare.”

“Yikes. This she/her Navy Commander is apparently a medical director for ‘transgender healthcare’ at a Naval center in California. Can you please look into this?” the post read.

Hours later, Hegseth tweeted back, writing, “Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired.”

It’s so wonderful that the man running our military can make a grammatically unsound joke after potentially ruining a Navy doctor’s life.

It’s unknown whether Janelle Marra, the doctor in question, was actually fired by Hegseth, but the speed with which she went from anonymously serving her country to being the target of social media hate, to possibly even being fired for her beliefs by a federal official, is staggering.

Libs of TikTok is run by Chaya Raichik, who has been designated an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for her rabid anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda. On Bluesky, lawyer Alejandra Caraballo called Libs of TikTok “the digital stasi,” comparing the account to the East German secret police. “It’s all a spectacle packaged as content. Destroying people’s lives for profitable ideological bloodsport.”

She continued, “Anything as innocuous as a pride flag can cause a federal investigation now or people to lose their jobs.… The spectacle is there to create fear in everyone else that they need to comply or they are next.”

Gun rights groups are, well, up in arms over reports that the Trump administration is considering banning transgender Americans from possessing firearms.

As conservatives use the deadly mass shooting in Minneapolis last week to vilify the transgender community—the shooter was transgender—CNN and The New York Post reported Thursday that Donald Trump’s Justice Department is in preliminary talks about implementing a gun ban for transgender people.

While Republican presidents are typically the darlings of Second Amendment advocates, this idea was denounced swiftly and roundly by every major gun rights organization.

The National Rifle Association condemned “any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”

Gun Owners of America said the organization “opposes any & all gun bans. Full stop.” In another post, GOA deplored the addition of “any new category of persons to the unconstitutionally broad ‘mental defective’ category,” which would “not only block them from purchasing firearms but could result in door-to-door gun confiscation from that new category of individuals.”

On X, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights wrote, “As history proves, any new rules the government invents today will be abused against ill-favored communities, including conservatives and law-abiding gun owners, tomorrow.” The proposal is “just insanity,” an NAGR spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms issued a statement saying, “We needn’t make scapegoats of others who had nothing to do with that outrage, just to create the impression something is being done.”

The Firearms Policy Coalition warned: “If the Trump Administration—or any administration—unwisely and immorally chooses to wield the force of government in conflict with the Constitution, federal law, or our values, FPC will take aggressive action to defend the rights of peaceable people, just as we have many times before.”

Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education at the Second Amendment Foundation, called the idea “blatantly unconstitutional” and lacking “any legal basis.” Considering the outpouring of criticism from gun groups, Moros wrote on X: “To the extent [the proposed ban] was a trial balloon, we all hit it like a clay pigeon.”

The Department of Homeland Security has already started bragging about its agency’s biggest single-site enforcement operation at a Hyundai plant in Georgia—but one close U.S. ally isn’t happy at all.

Most of the nearly 500 people arrested in a massive raid at a Hyundai plant Thursday were South Korean citizens, said Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Steve Schrank, who oversaw the operation. The New York Times reported that the detainees included employees and executives at two South Korean companies, Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solutions, a battery manufacturer.

Now South Korea seems seriously pissed.

In a statement Friday, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned that the “economic activities of Korean investment companies and the rights and interests of Korean citizens must not be unfairly infringed upon during U.S. law enforcement operations.”

The Foreign Ministry added that it would dispatch diplomats to respond to the raid and that it had urged the U.S. Embassy in Seoul “to exercise extreme caution” in regard to the rights of Korean citizens.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lee Jaewoong confirmed Friday that a “large” number of the individuals detained were South Korean, but did not provide an exact figure.

Schrank, the officer who oversaw the operation, declared that the raid “in fact was the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of homeland security investigations.”

While Schrank claimed the workers arrested were either undocumented or working illegally, he said that some lawful U.S. citizens and permanent residents had been detained and released.

Trump met with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung late last month, in a conversation that spanned several geopolitical topics—and also included the topic of forced prostitution.

President Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to use against what he claims to be state-sponsored drug cartels in the Caribbean. This comes just days after the administration bombed what it claimed was a Venezuelan “drug boat” with 11 Tren de Aragua “narco-traffickers.” 

The fighter jets will arrive in Puerto Rico next week, according to sources who spoke with Reuters, and will be part of Trump’s new military campaign in the region.

Trump has claimed that Venezuela is offering direct support to drug traffickers working in and around the United States. The country has also been central to his immigration crackdown.

“We have to protect our country and we’re going to. Venezuela has been a very bad actor. They’ve been sending millions of people into the country. Many of them are Tren de Aragua, some of the worst people anywhere in the world,” Trump said shortly after the boat attack on Tuesday.   

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed Trump’s comments, claiming that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “is acting as the kingpin of a narco state.… He’s involved in the kind of drug running that has affected the American people directly.” 

Maduro has denied this frequently, instead focusing on the fact that the U.S. is bombing his citizens and accusing him of sponsoring drug traffickers, all while it increases military pressure against him. 

“They are seeking a regime change through military threat,” Maduro told journalists plainly on Monday. 

Eighty percent of illegal maritime drug flow comes from the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic, where Trump has sent bombs and fighter jets. The administration is seeking to use excuses like the “immediate threat” posed by Venezuela in order to further broaden Trump’s use of the military in situations where he has no legal authority to use it. Just look to his threats to Mexico, his military crackdowns in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and his threats against countless other American cities for further confirmation.