Anna Merlan

6 days ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration. “We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that.

4 weeks ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. In a press conference Wednesday morning that surely delighted his allies in the anti-vaccine movement, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a report about apparent rising autism rates with a vow to look at “environmental factors” as a possible cause.

1 month ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. In the summer of 2023, Mohammad bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a 55-year-old retired teacher, was sentenced to death by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for posts he made on Twitter and YouTube, criticizing the country’s ruling family and calling for freedom for religious clerics.

1 month ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

On Tuesday, MAGA Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna presided over a colorful hearing devoted to one specific goal: speedrunning a revival of 61 years of conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.In that goal, Luna, the chairwoman of the brand-new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and her witnesses—a bouquet of JFK researchers, including famed director Oliver Stone—succeeded admirably.

1 month ago | motherjones.com | Anna Merlan

A fake website meant to look like a CDC webpage was put up sometime this month and quickly taken offline, but not before diligent information manipulation researchers noticed several signs that it was likely connected to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The site falsely suggested a link between vaccines and autism, using “testimonial” videos made by CHD and long-debunked scientific disinformation.