Walk into any New Age crystal shop in Sedona, Arizona, or a hot-yoga studio in Oakland, California, or maybe a socialist bookshop in Boston, Massachusetts. Look around for the kookiest granola grandma you can find. You know the type. She’ll drive up in a battered Prius with a peeling No Nukes bumper sticker. And she’ll probably be wearing purple sneakers.
Talk to this sweet lady for five minutes and you will likely learn which planet is rising in her zodiac sign. Ask about her health and she’ll tell you about her detoxifying juice fasts and how she avoids radiation from cellphone towers. She thinks Big Pharma is a big conspiracy and that vaccines aren’t “natural.” She doesn’t trust doctors but does rely on tarot cards when making life decisions. Oh, and the aliens definitely are coming, but she hopes they’ll be “higher beings.”
It’s all cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but mostly harmless. Now let’s turn to our new secretary of health and human services. He agrees with our hippie grandma about everything from vaccines to the dangers of cellphones. (He hasn’t gone on the record regarding tarot cards.) But where she is responsible for only a houseful of cats, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now in charge of our country’s entire bureaucracy governing health care, pharmaceutical safety, and medical research.
What could go wrong?
It’s hard to believe (but also weirdly predictable) that this lifelong Democrat and environmental grifter became a hero to the MAGA movement. A scattergram of RFK Jr.’s beliefs would map almost precisely with the ideas embraced by the wackiest characters on Fred Armisen’s Portlandia series combined with a smattering of X-Files conspiracy theories. It’s all late-20th-century leftism meets crunchy alternative lifestyles meets anti-American paranoia.
Like a 1970s commune member, RFK Jr. drinks unpasteurized milk and thinks we should go back to preindustrial methods of farming. He doesn’t approve of fertilizer or GMO crops (not even the “golden rice” genetically modified to boost vitamin A in the diets of poor children at risk of blindness and death). In fact, Kennedy is suspicious of modern technology in general. He led the campaign to shut down the Hudson Valley’s safe and carbon-free Indian Point nuclear power plant. He thinks 5G cellular networks are a plot to control users and told Joe Rogan that Wi-Fi “opens your blood-brain barrier” to toxins.
RFK Jr. famously went to Harvard (where he apparently majored in drug dealing, according to classmate Kurt Andersen). But he seems to have received his real education—the one that stuck—at the Howard Zinn/Oliver Stone Academy. Kennedy has never met an anti-American conspiracy theory he doesn’t like. He believes the CIA killed his uncle John F. Kennedy, and that his own father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was also the victim of a plot (and not one conducted by the Palestinian assassin who repeatedly wrote “RFK Must Die!” in his notebooks). Did you know government planes are spraying dangerous “chemtrails” in the sky? RFK Jr. thinks DARPA is responsible. Is our government hiding crashed UFOs? Maybe. “I suppose they want to keep it secret so they can weaponize these technologies,” he mused last year. Was 9/11 an inside job? Kennedy says he “won’t take sides” on the question but ominously notes, “There’s strange things that happened.” Was Covid-19 a global conspiracy? Absolutely. Kennedy wrote a whole book about that one, The Real Anthony Fauci, which asserts that Fauci and his co-conspirator Bill Gates launched “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy.”
Kennedy is best known, of course, for his decades-long battle against vaccines. In 2005, he published a long screed in Rolling Stone (and on the Salon website) alleging that vaccines were responsible for the rise in autism diagnoses. Filled with errors and wild allegations, the piece became a journalistic scandal. Both publications eventually pulled the story. (Rather than repeat the overwhelming case against the autism claim, let me recommend Seth Mnookin’s book, The Panic Virus. Alternatively, I suggest visiting any cemetery populated before World War II and counting the number of single-digit lifespans chiseled in stone.) But RFK Jr. is oddly immune to scandal and remains unembarrassed in his anti-vaccine beliefs.
He’s getting results. Thanks partly to his efforts, vaccination rates keep falling in the United States. Childhood diseases that were nearly banished are bouncing back. A measles outbreak is currently spreading across the country, with close to 1,000 cases and three deaths so far. RFK Jr. has made one tepid statement in support of measles vaccines. But his heart clearly wasn’t in it. He soon pivoted back to telling Sean Hannity that the measles vaccine actually causes diseases, and directing the CDC to focus on alternative treatments such as vitamins.
Still, like most cranks, RFK Jr. occasionally hits on the truth. He’s right that there’s too much sugar and other junk in the American diet. And, yes, our public health authorities overreached egregiously in their pandemic policies. But far more often, our new health czar simply mixes some dollops of reality into a toxic stew of crackpot ideas and paranoid fantasies.
Kennedy’s Covid theories are typical: It’s true that the U.S. funded some gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And, as I’ve written too many times to count, it is a huge scandal that Fauci and others tried to cover up that history. But it’s not true that the U.S. was secretly “developing ethnically targeted bioweapons,” as Kennedy said at a New York press dinner in 2023. And it is something like a blood libel to assert that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He added that he doesn’t know whether that targeting was “deliberate.” But the damage was done.
In RFK Jr.’s paranoid worldview, there is always a “they” behind the scenes. The people he calls “globalists” or the “new oligarchy” are controlling world events. They don’t want us to know the truth about 9/11. They are suppressing natural cures in order to pump us full of expensive drugs. They “must be stopped.” I don’t think I have to remind COMMENTARY’s readers who this unspecified “they” usually turns out to be once this kind of thinking takes root in a society.
Like a true conspiracy theorist, Kennedy is immovable in his conviction that he alone knows the truth; no quantity of factual evidence can change his mind. He’s done his own research! In his Fauci book, Kennedy proudly outlines his antipathy toward modern science in general. The real enemy, he writes, is “the century-old predominance of germ theory.” That’s right, folks. Our new head of HHS doesn’t believe germs are the main cause of infectious disease. It’s like learning that the new NASA administrator thinks the Earth is flat. To him, the discovery of pathogens—the most important advance in the history of medicine—is just another plot, this time to help Big Pharma push “patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons” instead of “fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.”
This is wacko logic of the silliest sort. But when combined with Kennedy’s conspiracy-minded vindictiveness, it can also be deadly. Trump promised he would let Kennedy “go wild on the medicines.” What will happen if RFK Jr. succeeds in bringing the pharmaceutical industry into compliance with his 18th-century view of disease? It is a sign of Trump’s solipsistic recklessness that he couldn’t care less about any of this.
It’s too soon to say just how wild Kennedy might go on our public health system. The measles outbreak keeps spreading, and avian flu is ripping through America’s farms. But our HHS secretary can barely bestir himself to focus on those problems (except to advise letting bird flu “run through the flock.”) In contrast, he showed giddy enthusiasm at a recent press conference announcing plans to remove artificial colors from breakfast cereals and other products. “We have them on the run now,” he said of the food companies.
While new and resurgent diseases circulate menacingly, our nation’s top health official is bravely manning the barricades, protecting our children from…Fruit Loops.
Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
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