Make America Hypocritcal...Again?
A comprehensive list of Bobby's anti-science beliefs
This was quite the photo to wake up to yesterday.
While the future inspiration of many dissertations—if colleges remain in four years—I want to recap a few insightful articles on MAHA that have been shared over the past week. I’ve noticed a vast distance between what commenters claim RFK Jr stands for and his actual words, so hopefully this reading list catches people up—at least for those interested in what his actual plans are.
First, my Conspirituality co-host, Matthew Remski, shared this thread on Bluesky detailing all the episodes we’ve done covering Bobby. (You can find me on Bluesky as well.)
In June 2023, Matthew, Julian Walker, and I published this article in Time about Bobby’s conspiritualist leanings.
Funnily enough, rereading it in preparation for this list, I found I still have the same question:
Kennedy isn’t wrong when he’s said that industry lies about pollution and Big Pharma extracts odious profits while neoliberal bureaucrats shrug. But there’s a difference between seeing connections and building real-world solutions. After rejecting scientific evidence on viruses and vaccines, what’s Kennedy’s actual plan?
Sure, we know his misrepresents Ozempic and plans on firing 600 federal health workers. How is any of going to make America healthy?
We cover a lot in this piece, including his anti-vaccination activism in Samoa that lead to a measles outbreak that infected 5,700 citizens and killed 83 people; his constant refusal to acknowledge that vaccines are incredibly well-tested; his apocalyptic religious musings; his fear that Bill Gates is spying on all of us with satellites; 5G something something—you get where this is leading.
Our piece focused more on historical data. Surgical oncologist David Gorski covered Bobby’s anti-science leanings (and those of his MAHA crew mates) in great detail in “RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary will be a catastrophe for public health and medical research.” After reading Gorski’s excellent analysis, you realize his title is underselling the problem.
It should always have been clear to anyone that, if RFK Jr. were ever to be put in charge of the federal health apparatus, either as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) or in some “czar” role, it would be an extinction-level threat to science-based federal health policy, which would be replaced with pseudoscience, quackery, and conspiracy theories.
McGill University science communicator Jonathan Jarry is also not being hyperbolic in his article, “Kennedy’s Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of Lies.” Jarry does a great job synthesizing the MAHA crew’s varied schemes, grifts, and (sadly influential) misinformation.
While neither crystal balls nor Tarot cards can predict the scope and extent of the damage we are about to witness to public health and trust in science, an examination of RFK Jr’s budding coalition reveals a dire situation. Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) has repeatedly been called a “cult” by the media. It certainly is a cult of personality. RFK Jr and his campaign riffed on the slogan, creating Make America Healthy Again or MAHA.
Perhaps the biggest sign that RFK Jr will not impact America as he plans is due to Trump’s record on the environment, food industry, and regulatory bodies based on his first term. Journalist Lisa Held asks the seemingly benign question, “Can Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ‘Make America Healthy Again’?”
The answer is no.
Held details the policies Trump put into place starting in 2016; also his gutting of regulations. Given his second term is going to be even more of that, and quicker, the notion that Bobby will have any measurable impact is severely misguided.
But while the issues cross party lines, MAHA is an extension of MAGA, and that conversation is now happening in the middle of a politically charged and consequential moment. “It will get worse,” Marion Nestle said, if Trump gets into office. “We already know that, because we just had four years of that.”
It’s a solid overview of Trump’s first-era policies, though I pause when seeing the Environmental Working Group quoted. You can read this article by Dr Andrea Love or listen to Love and cosmetic chemist Dr Michelle Wong on Conspirituality about EWG’s chemophobia activism.
Speaking of Dr Love, “RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary will be catastrophic for science & public health” is also not hyperbolic. She offers an acute rundown of all the anti-science views that Bobby espouses, including his chemophobic stance, which he’s attempted to shove into his newly formed MAHA coaltion.
RFK Jr. fabricated and profited off anti-agricultural disinformation. Did you know that RFK Jr. was actually the orchestrator behind many of the lawsuits alleging links between glyphosate and cancer?
Just to be clear: glyphosate is one of the safest herbicides that are used in order to ensure farmers can grow foods to feed the planet. Over 20 safety and expert scientific agencies globally have come to the same conclusion. (read more here, here, here, and here). In fact, glyphosate has replaced more harmful herbicides, reducing the risk to farmers and the environment.
But lawsuits are lucrative. RFK Jr. made millions of dollars in civil lawsuits creating emotional arguments that persuade people without evidence (no, jury trials are not scientific data). And RFK Jr. leveraged the fear about glyphosate into broader fear about GMOs.
The list goes on.
It’s not that every plan RFK Jr puts forward is terrible. Some ideas are quite good. Ending pharma lobbying and DTC advertisements are both great ideas. The idea that those initiatives would pass a deregulatory administration more focused on gutting health and environmental safeguards than strengthening them is laughable, however.
About as laughable as a photo featuring the man who plans on making a nation healthy scarfing down McDonald’s when hanging with his billionaire crew.
And to be clear, it’s not about McDonald’s.
It’s about the hypocrisy.