No One Left Alive

Plus: Vaccine committee meets, privatizing air traffic control, the digital land as a fairy-tale realm, and more...

War crimes cover-up? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is finding his way into trouble due to his handling of the legally suspect Caribbean boat strikes, which have killed over 80 people so far.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Hegseth gave verbal orders to kill everybody aboard a vessel believed to be carrying drugs off the coast of Trinidad back on September 2. At the time of the strike, there appeared to be two survivors clinging to the wreckage; the Special Operations commander overseeing the mission ordered another strike to kill the two men.

Now, lawmakers are trying to investigate those who made and carried out the orders; the Trump administration seems likely to scapegoat those below Hegseth, like Adm. Frank M. Bradley (the Special Ops commander). It also seems like legislators are not going to buy the Trump administration's arguments on the legality of the boat strikes. The Justice Department says we are in a "non-international armed conflict" with cartel groups—deemed terrorist organizations—and that service members who carry out attacks are immune from prosecution, but it's not clear that anyone is going to buy these far-fetched arguments.

The White House press secretary, who has been engaged in some Hegseth-culpability erasure (saying that Bradley "worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed"), is "throwing us, the service members, under the bus," one official told the Post. Another characterized it as "'protect Pete' bullshit."

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RFK Jr.'s vaccine committee meets: This week, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—assembled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—will meet and make recommendations for how the childhood immunization schedule might be changed. "Decisions by the group are not legally binding, but they have profound implications for whether private insurance and government assistance programs are required to cover the vaccines," reports The New York Times. 

Many are apoplectic about this, but the actual suggested changes appear likely to be relatively minor this time around: The committee will likely consider changing the recommendations surrounding the Hepatitis B vaccine, which is administered to all infants right after birth. It's unlikely that there will be a massive public health fallout from this: Hep B is rather rare (though serious), and there's really no reason to be immunizing all infants. If mothers have failed to receive prenatal care, their Hep B status would be unknown, but otherwise all mothers are routinely tested during pregnancy. (And even if this vaccine has been around for a while and is widely regarded as safe, parents should not be pressured into giving their newborn children unnecessary vaccines.) Other policy changes contemplated by the ACIP seem designed to restore parental confidence in vaccines, like whether vaccines should increasingly be offered as separate shots rather than as combination products.

Some folks in the RFK-universe have also expressed concern about the use of aluminum salts as adjuvants—substances that are added to enhance the immune system response—in vaccines and whether the aluminum could be linked to autism. There's not a ton of great data supporting this, but it's likely the ACIP will also discuss adjuvants.

The American public's post-COVID crisis of faith in public health authorities—which is warranted, from my perspective—has led to a few devastating outcomes, like a current surge in pertussis cases and deaths that appear linked to vaccine refusal, and cyclical measles outbreaks. But some of the committee's instincts strike me as rather good: People must be met where they're at, and public health authorities should recognize that there's not necessarily a strict binary between "refuse all vaccines" and "follow health authorities to a tee." Many people fall somewhere in the middle, especially post-COVID, and public health officials must recognize the damage they did when they didn't treat the public like adults who could make their own choices for themselves.

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Scenes from New York: The strangest New York Times headline (and that's saying something): "School Integration Has Lost Steam. Will Mamdani Revive It in New York?"

The article's central claim is that school integration was never really completed. Beware that this is all actually a stalking horse for leveling students and abolishing programs that help the smartest learn at a faster pace. ("Already, Mr. Mamdani has taken one concrete step that advocates say could help address the issue, saying that he would phase out a gifted and talented program for kindergartners that has been criticized for admitting low numbers of Black and Latino children.")

Also, all this aside, is integration really the thing most worth fixing about our nation's (and this city's) public schools? What about improving school quality—phonics instruction, for starters—which would presumably help all people, regardless of race? The racial makeup of a school doesn't matter nearly as much as the school simply being decent.

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QUICK HITS

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• Tune into the Webathon livestream that I'm hosting today at 2 p.m. ET on YouTube with a rotating cast of Reason characters, handpicked by yours truly, to see how your donation powers our journalism:

• "On the surface, President Donald Trump's second-term personnel operation has been a smoothly running machine," reports Politico. "The Senate has confirmed more than 300 civilian nominees since January, even changing the chamber's rules to move them faster. But there are clear signs of breakdowns behind the scenes. Trump has withdrawn a record number of nominees for a president's first year in office as he faces a combination of GOP pushback against some picks, vetting issues, White House infighting and, in some cases, the president's own mercurial views."
• Words I didn't expect to read in The Washington Post: "The government needs to get out of the air traffic control business." The editorial board goes on to cite the examples of New Zealand and Canada, which both spun off air traffic control, to good results.
• "Adapting begins with seeing the internet for what it actually is—not a drug, nor a set of behaviors, but a place we travel to, with its own geography and customs," writes Katya Ungerman (who also writes as Katherine Dee) for The New York Times. "It's not a physical place, but it's no less real. Anyone who came of age online knows the feeling of crossing that threshold: When you log on, time runs differently, the body slips away, and, as one early inhabitant put it, 'the selves that don't have bodies' step forward. Our earliest language about the internet seemed to understand its nature best. The central question of cyberspace has always been one of navigation. How do we move through this world while remaining human? What do we bring back from our travels? What bargains do we strike unknowingly? And how do we step back into the world of bodies when part of us would rather remain online?" (Later on: "The old tales didn't necessarily warn against interacting with the otherworld, nor did they say its inhabitants were evil. But they did warn against failing to understand their nature, against forgetting that some boundaries exist for good reason.")
• Pretty much:

There are good pieces to be written about the problem of benefit cliffs as you move up the income ladder and the rise of housing and child care costs but if you think America is full of people living in de facto poverty at $100K I don't believe you have ever visited America.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 26, 2025