“Hard to believe that in 2025 we have to be telling people that vaccines are safe and slavery was bad.”
– Facebook post
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
-Isaac Asimov
In her later years when she was much more an intellectual influencer than a fiction author, Ayn Rand developed theories of politics and a certain vocabulary to refer to common concepts. And one of her terms was “Attila and the Witch Doctor.” This referred to the idea that every tyrant needs something to back him up in the realm of debate. “Attila” refers to the outright thug who sees government solely in terms of brute force. Examples would be the famous dictators of the 1940s and Third World strongmen. “The Witch Doctor” is his necessary complement, the intellectual influencer who promotes and enables the anti-reason collectivism of the Attila with nonsense philosophy and sophistry that usually comes down to “reality isn’t real”, “you can’t prove anything” or “the people who claim objectivity exists are just lying.” Examples would be various breeds of post-modernists, or anybody who says that politics has less to do with abstract ideas than power relationships. This sort of thing used to be the province of the Left, but just as the old fascists stole all their best lines from the communists, the alt-Right fully embraces “post-truth” as a means to power, by convincing people to doubt what was previously assumed, whether it was proven or not. Which makes it that much easier to assume control: When you’re a dictator, the goal is not necessarily to make people only believe the State, it’s to make them not believe anything, so that they can’t trust anything and therefore your nonsense is just as valid as the other guy’s verified facts.
We already know that Donald Trump is America’s Attila – the bone-in-the-nose, ooga-booga tribal war chieftain who stomps on everything in his path and calls that governance. But who in this terminology is the Witch Doctor of the Trump Party? It’s pretty obvious, especially after this month: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy was of course a famous member of a Democratic Party political dynasty and remained a Democrat until fairly recently when he became more at odds with the Party over his “unorthodox” beliefs about the health system. He does in fact have a lifelong history of alternative self-medication, dating back at least to college, where he credited his heroin addiction with improving his attention span in class. Despite disdain for vaccines and other mainstream medical services, Kennedy has continued to be plagued by health issues, including a memory loss that he attributed to “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”. His voice has been permanently damaged by spasmodic dysphonia, causing it to be rough and difficult to understand. The reasons for his conditions and the extent of them are unknown because he has not released his medical records.
His wife is the actress Cheryl Hines, recently most famous for appearing in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which she played the normie bystander wife of a gravel-voiced crank who antagonizes everyone around him.
During COVID, Kennedy attracted controversy by saying that not only did the virus originate in China, it was developed to depopulate nations while specifically avoiding “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Well, seriously, if you were China and you were trying to screw with the United States, why would you target the people who go to Chinese restaurants?
Even so, RFK Junior had developed a respectable civilian career as an environmental advocate and lawyer for disadvantaged communities. So being against “the establishment” in various senses put him in the same category as Tulsi Gabbard and some other nominal Democrats who no longer aligned with that party but were not really conservative enough for Republicans. Accordingly, with his vaccine-skeptic agenda, RFK made an independent run for president in 2024, which given how close the polls were made him a real threat to Donald Trump, given that he attracted the kind of people who were, again, not conservative but less likely to vote for Kamala Harris than Trump. This came to a head when both RFK and Trump were invited to the Libertarian Party 2024 convention to appeal for their endorsement and Kennedy was well-received and Trump was… not. So after that Trump put the moves on Kennedy (and Gabbard) to appeal for their endorsement, which he got. This despite the fact that Kennedy was a former liberal and had been quoted as saying Trump was a “terrible human being”, a “discredit to democracy”, and “probably a sociopath“. And perhaps not coincidentally, once Trump got elected with the support of independents and former Democrats, he gave Kennedy a Cabinet position running the Department of Health and Human Services, where he would be able to run the bureaucracy in the exact opposite direction from where it had been. And even before that, once Kennedy endorsed Trump, he identified his health-skeptic movement with broader Trumpism, calling it “Make America Healthy Again.”
“Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) is the only MAGA sub-movement with its own famous name, which is odd given that it is only one of several important follower movements such as MARA (Make America Racist Again), MACA (Make America Chauvinist Again) and MASA (Make America Stupid Again). But like MAGA (Make America Great Again), MAHA works through the Orwellian tactic of using a positive label in order to promote its exact opposite.
As HHS Secretary, Kennedy creates policy based on the broader “MAHA” agenda, which attacks the use of vaccines as a cause of autism in children (with little evidence) and otherwise attacks the use of pharmaceuticals and processed foods in the American lifestyle. His idea of running the health care bureaucracy seems to center on slashing its staff. And merely in his public actions, Kennedy demonstrates a cavalier disregard for what ought to be the responsibilities of his job.
For example, in response to the mass shooting at a Catholic school, RFK not only blamed the use of anti-depressants by juveniles, he said, “When I was a kid, we had shooting clubs at our school. People, kids, my classmates, other people would bring a .22 rifle with their guns to school and park it in the parking lot.”
So apparently we’re supposed to believe that the son of Bobby Kennedy and the nephew of Jack Kennedy is okay with kids taking guns to school.
Next he’s probably going to advocate for the health benefits of drunk driving.
Which only points up the fact that however sordid the Kennedy clan in were in their private lives, at least they didn’t bring their vices into politics.
Kennedy’s basis of policy is pretty well summed up by an interview he did with Tucker Carlson, where he said,, “My opinion, I always tell people, is irrelevant. We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts. Right. We were told at the beginning of COVID don’t look at any data yourself, don’t do any investigation yourself. Just trust the experts. And trusting the experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation, and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.”
(Which led to John Cleese’s line, ‘I wonder what the qualifications are for not being an expert’.)
This statement in itself goes a long way to explain how MAGA in general and MAHA in particular can appeal to an eclectic group of people who wouldn’t necessarily go along with the darker aspects of MAGA – like the racism, authoritarianism and religious hypocrisy – by appealing to their intellectual vices, and thus eventually getting them to embrace the racism, authoritarianism and religious hypocrisy.
A central issue with the Trump regime (because ‘administration’ is the Hegelian radical antithesis of what they’re doing) is that you can only rebel against The Man so long until you either keep failing or you succeed, and at that point you become The Man. That’s where Republicans (including MAHA) are now. And leading from that, once “conservatives” (now including MAHA) get power, they reveal the hypocrisy of their movement: rather than endorsing freedom against an overbearing government so they can live according to their choice, they want to commandeer that overbearing government to their purposes to make everyone else live according to their choice.
The same people who wail “this is a republic, not a democracy” fail to bring up the reason the Founders made the distinction, and why they put so many counter-majoritarian elements in the US Constitution: You want to have people who actually know what they’re doing running things, even if the general direction is set by the public. Otherwise the public good itself would be undermined: “It is a just observation, that the people commonly INTEND the PUBLIC GOOD. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always REASON RIGHT about the MEANS of promoting it. They know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.” (The Federalist, No. 71)
And this is why the Trump regime demonstrates that our old republic really is now a democracy because it demonstrates the indulgences that the Founders thought pure democracy would fall err to. Not just the takeover by a demagogue but the inconstancy of public policy based on unqualified but popular opinions.
MAHA, while represented by Mr. Kennedy, embraces a whole range of alternative health theories, some of which, like avoiding processed foods or eliminating artificial food dyes, are hardly bad in themselves. The movement also gained traction in the wake of COVID quarantines (which were enforced mainly by state governments, NOT the first Trump Administration, cause ‘freedom’), especially in regard to not allowing people to congregate in houses of worship. However some of these concerns are perennial quack theories. In particular, MAHA opposes the fluoridation of public water. Their designation of what constitutes ‘healthy’ vs. ‘unhealthy’, rather than examining the data, is based largely in culture war prejudices. For instance, it has been noted by people across the political spectrum that the corn syrup lobby in Congress is influential enough that it has changed the nature of our food products so that glucose is processed more efficiently. This has helped lead to an obesity epidemic in this country. Thus RFK supported Trump’s pressure campaign to make Coca-Cola change their American product back to sugar from high fructose corn syrup. However, chemically there is little difference and being dependent on a diet of sugar is hardly more healthy than a diet of corn syrup products. Likewise RFK promoted Shake Shack’s decision to make French fries with beef tallow rather than vegetable oil, but that doesn’t mean that cooking in animal fat is healthier than cooking in seed oil, because it’s saturated fat.
The common element is the idea that “democracy” (an idea that MAGAts oppose when it means making representative government more accessible) justifies Asimov’s observation that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Those who objected to the decisions of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other experts during COVID, on the grounds that they were often in error, blank out the point that they were almost as much in the dark as the rest of us but still acted on the basis of the knowledge they had, and it was the basis of that collective knowledge that led Trump to endorse a ‘warp speed’ vaccine program during his last term, after COVID almost killed him because he didn’t trust the experts. Prior to that, his alternative to the experts who were potentially in error was to describe the virus as a ‘Democrat hoax’, which was totally in error. And yet that political correctness is now the basis of public policy, even after it has already proven to be in error.
A writer at The Bulwark summed up the impervious selective rationale: “if you’re an expert who gets one thing wrong, it damns you. If you’re a total lunatic crank who gets one thing right, it makes you bulletproof.”
In any case Thursday September 4, RFK appeared at a Senate hearing reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services, and he was grilled by Senators of both parties, including Bill Cassidy (R.-Louisiana), who had voted for Kennedy’s confirmation, and who pointed out that Kennedy had recommended that Donald Trump be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for pushing the “Operation Warp Speed” COVID treatment in his first term, even though Kennedy in his office has restricted access to COVID vaccines. It was the sort of scrutiny and hostility that Kennedy should have received when he was originally nominated.
Better late than never. Except now it’s too late.
Because the whole premise of fascism, Trumpism in particular, is that you never have to say you’re sorry. Now that Kennedy is installed as head of Health and Human Services, Trump is never going to get rid of him, very much in spite of all the people telling him that he is exactly the wrong man for the job. And in that respect Kennedy is the perfect symbol for the second Trump term and its malicious disregard for competence, not to mention a perfect example of how Trump can corrupt even those outside the conservative orbit, not so much in spite of their avowed skepticism as because of it.
Too bad.
I mean if you’re going to have an ex-heroin addict as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, you should get Iggy Pop. He’s taken enough pharmaceuticals that he should have spontaneously exploded over 50 years ago, he’s at least 73, and he’s still alive. If that doesn’t qualify you as a health expert, I don’t know what does.
