The jocks are winning

RFK Jr doesn't have an off switch

Aging is strange. The human body inevitably breaks down over time, yet save any cognitive diseases, the mind doesn’t necessarily follow suit. When younger, I imagined a linear path of decline, with thoughts accompanying the rest of biology. Not so. My father, at 80, tells me he feels the same. When he recalls his time as a navy signalman, it’s like it just happened.

Starting down at 50, I’ve retained much of my physicality due to sheer stubbornness. I’ve often heard that discipline is a byproduct of aging, and I can confirm this, at least in certain regards. Depending on life situations, not everyone has this opportunity, so you have to make the best with what you have.

There are other byproducts I also didn’t expect. A big one: that high school jock assholes would gain so much power.*

Perhaps it’s my own fault, believing in the promises of Savage Steve Holland (“Better Off Dead,” “One Crazy Summer”) and Cameron Crowe (“Say Anything”) and all the other eighties-era directors who swore that the bully would get his comeuppance in the end.

I’ll own my naivety on this front. I had too much faith in John Cusack.

The jock asshole echoed loudly when RFK Jr straight-up body shamed Governor Patrick Morrissey (R, West Virginia) on stage.

Kennedy opens by saying,

I got to know I said to Dr Morr…Governor Morrissey the first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrissey.

Unbelievably, it went downhill from there—and Kennedy is on this man’s team. Bad enough to stoop so low when trolling an enemy. Here the Republican crowd hoots and cheers as Kennedy suggests putting their governor on a carnivore diet followed by a public weigh-in. Morrissey concedes and invites Kennedy to be his personal trainer, but what the fuck else are you going to do in such a situation?

Kennedy’s allegiance with Jillian Michaels, whose star rose when she regularly yelled at people on The Biggest Loser, makes more sense now. To be honest, different motivations work for different people. I spent enough time teaching in gyms to know that some people gravitate toward militarized instruction.

Besides, Kennedy’s comments are of a different flavor than Michaels’, with a different intention. It’s one thing to scream at people while they’re working out; it’s another to catch someone off guard in front of their constituents.

As I pointed out last week, obesity isn’t only attributable to “lack of willpower,” though you’d be hard to find any other reason from the MAHA coalition. There are dozens of reasons why someone might be overweight that have nothing to do with diet.

Curiosity isn’t part of the influencer playbook, however. It’s not monetizable.

I expect no reflection on Kennedy’s part. The man was born wealthy into one of America’s most prominent and recognizable families. Despite having his own struggles with addiction, he seems immune to extending empathy to anyone going through it now, whether he’s shitting on Ozempic as “cheating” (the drug is showing promise in treating addiction) or cutting funding on addiction research.

Not just addiction services. In the last week, Kennedy has announced he’s:

• Firing an additional 10,000 HHS employees

• Cutting entire vaccine advocacy and HIV prevention departments

• Disbanding The Administration for Community Living, which provided over 261 million meals to older adults, assistance to 1.5 million family caregivers, and 250,000 people with disabilities in 2022

• Burying a measles report that shows the worst outbreaks are occurring in under-vaccinated regions

• Planning on ending an entire infectious disease department

People who know what they’re talking about when it comes to medicine are alarmed as well. When the top vaccine official at the FDA resigned last week, he warned that Kennedy has no interest in working with scientists.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” he wrote.

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Kennedy’s MAGA ripoff coalition, MAHA, seems hellbent on destroying every facet of evidence-based medicine. Career experts are taking note. A recent Nature poll of over 1,600 scientists revealed that 75% are considering moving out of the country to find work, which isn’t surprising given the stark number of jobs that are now (or soon will be) gone.

What’s the end goal here? You can only blame Obama for so long, and these measles aren’t going anywhere.

As MAHA is effectively serving as a propaganda arm for Project 2025, it follows that Kennedy’s deregulatory and “efficiency” efforts will drive researchers into the private market, where biotech startups can patent solutions to sell personalized medicine at an obnoxiously high markup.

But there are too many people losing their jobs for all those startups to absorb. Too many agencies being dismantled, ensuring the next disease outbreaks will make peak Covid-era hospital systems look like a vacation.

Mania has taken hold. I can’t shake jock assholes echoing in my ears every time I hear Kennedy and crew speak. The jocks never cared about being intelligent or even right. Their whole schtick was to dominate the room in hopes that everyone would surrender to their boisterousness. Their pride would swell for a moment, and inevitably deflate, because that hole inside of them could never be filled and they had no clue how to sew it shut. So they would destroy everything, even themselves—also an inevitable outcome of this course we’re on.

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* Not every athlete is a jock asshole. Most aren’t. The reason the assholes stick out is because everyone else knew they were the assholes.