The Buzz: Quiet, piggies; here’s your slop of news
Published 1:30 am Saturday, November 22, 2025
By Jon Bauer / Herald Opinion Editor
It’s been like waiting for a new season of “Real Housewives” to drop. After months of bickering and balking, Congress has passed — by nearly unanimous consent — and President Trump has signed — as if he wasn’t dragged into it kicking and kvetching — legislation requiring the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to release their files into the dealings of convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his crimes and his clients.
Trump is missing an opportunity here: He could have released leather-bound copies of the files — complete with gold lettering and gilt edges — that the MAGA faithful would have paid dearly for.
In other likely anticlimactic news this week:
The broke-mind virus: Reflecting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy theory linking childhood vaccines to autism, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its webpage on vaccines and autism to endorse that false link, wiping an earlier version of the page that said studies had shown no link between the two. The page now reads: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
Of course, we also now have to rule out as “not evidence-based” — because no studies have ruled out the possibility — that RFK Jr.’s brain worm did not fail its host’s logic classes at Harvard.
Is this your first trip to the island, Megyn? During a recent episode of her podcast, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Kelly appeared to play down the sins of Jeffrey Epstein, as she tried to make a distinction regarding pedophilia between young children and older teens: “He was into the barely legal type, like, he liked 15-year-old girls,” Kelly said. “I’m not trying to make an excuse for this, I’m just giving you facts — that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passer-by.”
Don’t bother parsing the logic of “teen types” passing for “even younger than they were” while looking “legal to a passer-by.” This is why podcasts are such a national treasure; they give anyone the opportunity to fill the void with logorrhea that no thinking person would say in normal conversation.
Do Pass Go, Do Collect $200 billion: A federal judge has ruled that Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, hadn’t violated antitrust rules to create a monopoly when it bought Instagram and Whatsapp when both were social media rivals of the tech giant. The Federal Trade Commission had accused Meta of using a “buy or bury” strategy to secure its network dominance. Meta, worth $1.51 trillion, now is free to pursue its business ambitions, including an expansion into artificial intelligence.
So, while Meta’s AI is duking it out with ChatGPT, Grok, Microsoft CoPilot, Claude, Google Gemini and DeepSeek to establish that all-powerful AI monopoly, you can doomscroll with confidence, content in the knowledge that your selection of social media benefited from a level playing field.
Bring your own chain saw: Former Special Government Employee™ Elon Musk, less than six months after his parting of ways with President Trump, is the guest of honor for a reunion of Department of Government Efficiency staffers in Austin, Texas, that will include two dinners at a high-end hotel and tours of Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and the Boring Co.
It’s just a shame that the $300 million White House ballroom isn’t complete yet to host the Muskrat Ball, celebrating the $2 trillion that DOGE said it would cut from federal spending but that possibly totaled less than an estimated $2 billion.
“Have you seen the bigger piggies in their starched white shirts?” President Trump lashed out at two women reporters this week, seeking responses regarding the Jeffrey Esptein files and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s part in the 2018 slaying of a Washington Post opinion writer, blasting ABC’s Mary Bruce for asking “a horrible, insubordinate and terrible question” of Salman, and shutting down Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey as she asked a follow-up question on the Epstine files with “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”
After both incidents, White House officials excused Trump’s behavior as his just being “hangry,” and led him to a trough of McDonald’s Extra Value Meals.
Small hands, warm heart: During the Oval Office meeting with the Saudi leader, Trump defended the prince against the allegation he had ordered the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, with an offhand “things happen.” Instead Trump, mocking Joe Biden who gave MBS a fist bump when they met in 2022, offered a chummier welcome: “Trump doesn’t give a fist pump. I grab that hand. I don’t give a hell where that hand’s been,” Trump said.
We won’t ask where either’s hands have been, but can anyone tell the difference between the blood on MBS’s hands and the ketchup on Trump’s?
Email Jon Bauer at jon.bauer@heraldnet.com.
