Kennedy’s Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of Lies
In Washington, wellness influencers and contrarians are auditioning to institutionalize pseudoscience in Trump’s White House.

Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 15 Nov 2024

When America sneezes, the world catches a cold. Donald Trump’s renewed tenancy in the White House, with anti-vaxxer-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr whispering in his ear, promises more than just sneezes. It heralds the return of vaccine-preventable illnesses, which do not stop at the border.

The anti-science movement is mere months away from being sworn into office in the United States. During Trump’s interregnum, a flock of medical contrarians and wellness warriors has coalesced around the figure of RFK Jr, who has now been chosen by Trump as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in his upcoming administration. 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.

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But Kennedy is not alone, as two siblings have rapidly been promoted as the shepherds of Kennedy’s MAHA movement: sister Casey and brother Calley Means. Their book, Good Energy, got them a spot on Tucker Carlson’s show, as well as a bevy of right-wing and alternative medicine podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, The Rubin Report, and The Doctor’s Farmacy with Mark Hyman M.D. Casey then leveraged this media attention into political gold by bringing the flock together to Washington, D.C. for a live-streamed, suits-and-ties bit of pseudoscience theatre hosted by Senator Ron Johnson and entitled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.”

The event was a masquerade, with contrarians donning the garbs of science and pretending to be the critical thinkers in the room. Their shared grievance was the claim that Americans are being poisoned by their food supply, leading to an apocalyptic epidemic of chronic disease. Universities and regulatory agencies have fallen prey to institutional capture: corporate money has rendered their testimonies hopelessly corrupt. Only the people present at the event can be trusted to save America from itself. They want to drain the science swamp but given their alignment with convicted criminal Trump and their own misunderstanding of the scientific process, they are more likely to trap Americans in quicksand than to end corruption.

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https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-health-and-nutrition-pseudoscience/kennedys-coalition-quacks-wants-feed-america-diet-lies