Gaetz, Hegseth, and RFK. Oh my!

Greetings, Meteor readers,

I am roughly two days away from finishing a Christmas sweater I started knitting in 2022, so please know that when it’s done you will be receiving a special newsletter that is only pictures of this sweater. I will not be stopped!

In today’s newsletter, we are picking ourselves up and reminding ourselves who’s really in charge in this country. Plus a call to greater action for GBV survivors in Kenya and your weekend reading list.

All the way from sleeve island,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

The bad boys club: Donald Trump’s horrifying picks for key government positions continue apace. There’s Stephen Miller for deputy chief of staff, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for health secretary, Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, and the pick that has produced the most mouth-frothing of all: Matt Gaetz for attorney general.

By now you likely know many of the reasons this newly former congressman should not get this job. The alleged sex trafficking for which he was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee. The terribly kept secret of his relationships with underage girls. The legal experience so thin that the Wall Street Journal wrote that his law degree “might as well be a doctorate in outrage theater.” His blindingly white teeth and startling Botox. (Fine, those don’t really matter, but they do look freaky.) The one saving grace here, small though it may be, is that even some Republicans say they cannot see a path to Senate confirmation for Gaetz.

THESE TEETH JUST DO NOT OCCUR IN NATURE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

But! And this is an enormous, Godzilla-sized “but”: Anyone who lived through the Brett Kavanaugh hearings—in which Susan Collins and other Republicans wrung their hands over the accusations of sexual assault, but then voted to confirm him—is right to be cynical about these protestations. Besides, the outrageousness of nominating a potential sex offender to run the justice department means that Trump is doing something intentional here: This is an explicit test of which senators will be loyal to him.

But if it’s a test for them, it is also a test for us. Government officials do not work or exist in a vacuum. At least as of today, they are still civil servants, and if we want to stop them from becoming lords of a fiefdom then we must continue the work of demanding better. Organizer Sandra Avalos wrote in Truthout this week, “Our communities are not new to hardship — but we have survived even the harshest conditions, and in those moments, built even more power. We know how to organize, how to protect one another, how to support those facing the brunt of the threats.”

In this case, it’s worth remembering that the “what are you going to do? They’re all crooks” reaction to the nomination of Matt Gaetz may be legitimate—but it also lets the Senators whose job it is to do the right thing off the hook, and they don’t deserve that pass. If you live in a state with one of those Republicans expressing even tepid doubts, it’s worth calling them. Quote those doubts back to them. Demand thorough hearings. Pressure your House members to release the ethics report into Gaetz. Remind them in any way you can that they work for us.

AND:

• In just the last three months, 97 women have been murdered in Kenya. According to a new report from Nation Africa, the increase in violence against women has reached crisis levels, with one hospital treating 4,000 cases of gender-based violence per month. In response, the Kenyan government is launching a national campaign to raise awareness and “establish and improve support systems” for victims of violence. But some activists say it’s not enough: “The government, parliament, and all other relevant stakeholders do little to contain this menace,” one woman’s representative told Nation Africa. “We need to see action and perpetrators being brought to book…Justice delayed is justice denied.”

• The Iranian government has announced it will be launching a “hijab removal treatment clinic” to offer “scientific and psychological treatment” for women who have chosen to go against the state’s mandate on head coverings. “It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison,” one woman in Iran told The Guardian. “We are struggling to make ends meet and have power outages, but a piece of cloth is what this state is worried about.”

• On this week’s episode of UNDISTRACTED, Brittany Packnett Cunningham is in conversation with abortion rights activist Cecile Richards and journalist Paola Ramos on  the “maddening and heartbreaking” results of the election. Richards, in particular, speaks to the importance of building up a coalition of women across racial divides, in spite of what we saw at the polls. “For too long, the fight for abortion rights was an exclusive club to some extent,” she tells Cunningham. “And we can’t do that anymore.”

• Elder millennials, dust off your eyeliner pencil: We’re going out. The iconic band My Chemical Romance has announced a 2025 tour and there could not be a better time to be standing in an arena screaming, “I’m not okay.”

WEEKEND READING 📚

On men: Looking for a break from toxic masculinity? You may be surprised to find respite in The Golden Bachelorette. (Slate)

On the internet: The phrase “your body, my choice,” recently popularized by a Hitler-admiring self-described incel, didn’t come to life overnight—it has a dark and longstanding history, Jia Tolentino explains. (The New Yorker)

On the images we keep: One writer’s practice of collecting images from Gaza preserves both the unspeakably bad and the brief moments of good. (The Baffler)

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