It’s always so nice when your work friends help with your personal projects, right? Having a work pal who knows about motorbikes come by on a Saturday to get yours running is a thing of communal beauty, a pleasing blurring of the lines between work and play. 

So, for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it’s gotta feel nice that the Department of Justice is helping out with a lawsuit that Kennedy brought in 2023 on behalf of the anti-vaccine organization he founded, Children’s Health Defense. That organization and several other misinformation-loving groups sued The Washington Post, the BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters, alleging the news outlets banded together to illegally boycott and suppress their dangerous anti-vaccine conspiracy claptrap. And the DOJ’s statement of interest, filed on Friday, backs this nonsense claim. 

One doesn’t need a fancy law degree to see how unsettling and unethical it is that the administration has picked up the torch on a lawsuit tied to a Cabinet member that was filed before he took on his new role. At least, Kennedy remembered to withdraw as an attorney of record after joining the government. That’s a bit more than what then-interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin did when, in his role as D.C.’s top prosecutor, he dismissed charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom Martin had recently represented. 

But since no one cares about conflicts of interest any longer, here we are. 

Children’s Health Defense lucked out—and not just because Kennedy became HHS secretary. Both President Donald Trump personally and his administration generally are very familiar with harassing media companies for not platforming right-wing lies. So why not bring that vast experience to bear for one of Kennedy’s pet projects?

Children’s Health Defense’s legal claim is that the media companies illegally colluded to boycott the speech of Children’s Health Defense and other anti-science types by forming a “Trusted News Initiative” to combat COVID-19 misinformation. Per the Children’s Health Defense, that violates the Sherman Act, the federal antitrust law. 

That might sound familiar since it’s a similar theory to what the Federal Trade Commission required as a condition to approve a merger between two large ad agencies. To get government sign-off, the post-merger agency had to enter into a consent order to resolve the FTC’s complaint that advertising agencies illegally colluded to boycott running advertising on certain media platforms. The consent order bans the agency from refusing to place ads on platforms based on ideological content and also bans them from declining to deal with an advertiser based on their political views.

And when it comes to suing media companies because they made you sad and that somehow broke the law, who is better at it than Donald Trump? 

What good fortune that Kennedy has such powerful friends to help him out here. Everyone is sure to enjoy this new reality where we’re forced to sit, eyes pinned open “Clockwork Orange”-style, as a steady stream of misinformation and hate speech is beamed directly into our eyeballs, courtesy of the United States government.