MAHA's fever dream

It's all so...simple

A telltale sign of indoctrination is increasing fervency.

Knowledge cuts a few ways. The time and energy spent studying a topic can lead to an appreciation for nuance, which is why deeply learned people know what they don’t know.

Problems usually arise when someone acquires a little bit of knowledge, which can lead to religious zeal. Since in today’s media environment extremity often wins out, that little knowledge can result in a craven desperation for acceptance and adoration, a moral righteousness, which usurps any possibility of nuance or complexity.

This is how social media is designed, and how the influencer captures attention: complex topics require unpacking, and no one has time for that. Complexity also requires humility, which is kryptonite to influencer culture. Maybe that’s partly a flaw in social interactions—humans are drawn to confidence men. A slow, meticulous process of uncovering layers of truth that are, by nature, open to amendment can’t possibly compete with the person who yells with such conviction.

This has always been a challenge in science communication, for example. Experts are painfully aware that even declarative statements require a handful of addendums. We know vaccines work for most people most of the time, but we have to hedge that against the fact that they don’t work for all of the people all of the time, and that in rare cases there are adverse reactions (beyond the well-known shitty feeling for a day).

Charlatans exploit this gap between certainty and humility (which we can also call rigor). They take a cue from famine relief efforts in the eighties, when astute marketers realized that an image of one starving child was more powerful than a million starving children. We can’t wrap our heads around a million, but we can empathize with the one on the screen. (A comparable recent analogy is Laken Riley, the young woman who was tragically murdered by an illegal immigrant that’s now become weaponized to threaten all immigrants.)

The anti-vax movement has seized upon both techniques to great effect. When the sheer number of VAERS submissions suits them—a system open for anyone to submit to, for any reason, without the burden of proof—they’ll weaponize that. But far more effective are anecdotal stories that are, in this media environment, also treated as immune to the burden of proof. They only require a narrative.

Humans are storytelling animals, which is why anecdotes go much further than a stream of PubMed links. This will always be a challenge for communicators of any sort, especially when they broker in the complexities of science. Humans generally prefer a simple story with a simple explanation. Being told one thing causes cancer is much easier to wrap our heads around than the dozen or more things that probably play a role.

So you’re faced with a choice: learn about those dozen or more things because you have an interest in understanding the complexities of cancer or buy into the idea that one thing is the culprit and continue scrolling.

Most of us know a little about a lot of things and one or two things we know a lot about. There’s no way anyone can educate themselves on everything. So then you’re faced with another option: listen to people who spend their lives focused on that one thing or follow those who claim to know a lot about a lot of things while, simultaneously, reducing all those things down to a single thing, for which they usually have something to sell you to “fix.”

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Registered dietitian Danielle Shine cuts through the noise of nutrition misinformation on the latest Clarity Lab.

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The single cause problem to simple solution pipeline is well established. Yet there’s a saturation problem. Social media has given everyone an opportunity to market simple solutions; only a handful can make it sustainable. In order to stand out, more fervency is required. Instead of being beholden to the rigors of complexity and all it demands—continual education; intellectual humility—they simply get louder and more demanding.

More…simple.

That’s how I felt watching Nicole Shanahan during her almost (and likely future) boss’s congressional hearings. Shortly after RFK Jr got grilled, and flailed, on day one, the former VP candidate threatened to use the billions dollars she received in a divorce to primary every Senator who dares to vote against Bobby.

theshanawow

A post shared by @theshanawow

During this fever dream, she claims that she helped elect Raphael Warnock as a Georgia Senator, stating that she will do everything in her power to make sure he doesn’t win again. The threat was extended to anyone who dares to vote against Kennedy. A few hours later, Warnock declared his no vote, to which Shanahan quickly replied.

Delusions of grandeur (“the only reason”) are common amongst the most fervent—and the most simple thinkers. Just as the complexities of biology challenge anti-vax rhetoric, the many moving parts of a Senate campaign are too much to consider. Things quickly become reductive: I gave a lot of money to a group that partly went to you, I must be the hero. And if I once gave you life, I can take it away as well.

Here we see the sheer power of reductiveness: nearly triple the retweets and likes for Shanahan with only 22% of the views (assuming this platform’s metrics are honest, which I’m skeptical of). Warnock lays out his reasoning for his decision, which, while not complex, requires a few layers of comprehension (such as an allegiance to his constituency). Shanahan rushes in with a hammer and starts indiscriminately bashing what she doesn’t like.

Which makes sense. Her almost-boss plays loose with evidence. Or makes shit up. It’s hard to distinguish given how many things he gets wrong.

Let’s consider the congressional hearings, one of the few times he’s received real-time pushback. Normally sheltered in a podcast world that fawns over him, Kennedy was confronted by people who know what they’re talking about, who brought receipts. Given the gravity of this nomination, media outlets continued due diligence after the hearings—something amenable Republican senators refused to do during their lovefest.

Here’s a sample:

• Kennedy claims he’ll be the first HHS Secretary to focus on chronic disease. In reality, “The N.I.H. spends tens of billions of dollars on research into chronic diseases, operating institutes dedicated to studying diabetes, obesity, neurological disorders and heart disease.”

• Kennedy claims young children are not at risk from Covid-19. Actually, Covid was the eighth-leading cause of death among children in the US between 2021-22.

• Kennedy claims 15% of children in America take Adderall, overshooting reality by 10%.

• Kennedy claims antidepressant medication is as addictive as heroin, which is contradicted by actual research.

• Kennedy claims he never compared the CDC’s vaccine programs to Nazi death camps, which sounded great until Senator Rafael Warnock read his own words back to him.

• Ditto Senator Michael Bennet, who read a podcast transcript after Kennedy claimed that he never said pesticides in the water supply causes kids to experience “sexual dysphoria.”

Kennedy also denied that he’s anti-vax and led every abortion-related question with “every abortion is a tragedy” in an attempt to build cred with a right-wing faction critical of his prior acceptance of women being able to do what they want with their bodies.

Kennedy even submitted a letter to the Senate designed to help his chances. Here too we find the sort of slipperiness that is his brand. The title of the letter:

Over 800 Medical Professionals Endorse RFK Jr. to Lead Health & Human Services,Showing Widespread Support from Medical Community to Make America Healthy Again

As Politico reports, a number of these doctors had their licenses revoked or suspended. A health coach and a firefighter were included in this list, which are definitely not “medical professionals.” Over 20 chiropractors signed on, which has particular resonance:

An AP investigation found that donations from a chiropractic group represented one-sixth of the revenues collected by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit in 2019.

Missing from the submission is mention of a letter signed by 17,000 doctors urging the Senate to reject his nomination. Note: these are all actual medical professionals.

Perhaps the most eye-opening finding of this entire nomination process is RFK’s financial disclosures.

A disclosure form filed for his nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic pulled in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vax speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.

This man is supported by a variety of professionals that make a living promoting anti-establishment, anti-science, and anti-institution messaging in order to sell a range of untested supplements and basically unregulated services. His appeal doesn’t end there, given backers like Shanahan are raw milk enthusiasts with a history of making dubious claims.

But the contrarians are having a moment and they’re going to, er, milk it for all its worth. Power and attention are seductive, especially when a glitch in human design is our incessant need for more and more even when enough is long established. Anyone with a billion dollars never needs to work again, a comfort most every human ever born will never experience.

This isn’t to say the ultra-wealthy shouldn’t continue to work, if they so choose. But when your passion is brokering in pseudoscientific practices that damage public health, and you threaten anyone who opposes you with the sheer volume of money at your disposal, there’s something ugly lying on the surface. I’m not qualified to speak to what’s swimming underneath, but I can sure as hell say that what we can see is frightening, and rather sad.

Because in one way or many, the MAHA fever dream has influenced the scrubbing of numerous CDC-related websites or data sets, including HIV/AIDS tracking, contraception, ending gender-based violence, and basically everything have to do with health-related issues that affect the LGBTQ community.

That’s not sad, it’s sadistic.

Real harm is coming to us, quickly, because a society incapable to tracking health will fall victim to very foreseeable diseases. Foreseeable when you have the resources available to you, that is.

Factor in violence aimed at any non-heterosexual community, all of whom have just had access to health data wiped away. This has long been part of the authoritarian playbook: erase resources and support for groups you would just as quickly be rid of. Conditions don’t need to rise the level of actually wiping them away for violence, in the form of vigilantes and barriers to healthcare access, to be achieved—as well as the emotional and psychic violence of needing to look over your shoulder every moment of your life.

This is all part of what MAHA has wrought, and Kennedy isn’t even installed yet. I hope that wellness folk screaming about food dyes and exercise begin to see the bigger picture. Some make claims about the “terrain” being the cause of disease, yet their unwillingness to grapple with the environment of the administration Kennedy is pining for quickly reveals their blind spots.

Which makes me question whether this has ever been about health—a question we all need to ask, even as the answer becomes more apparent every day.