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When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was nominated by Donald Trump last month to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Senator John Fetterman scoffed to Roll Call, “I’m not going to really take any kind of advice [from] a dude that chainsaws whale heads and delivers dead bears into a park.”
But this week, speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Fetterman softened his tone about Kennedy: “I’m not immediately, like, 100% hell no. If that’s going to be the guy, you have to discover where you can work together.”
The Journal also quoted Senator Cory Booker saying he’s not an “automatic” nay vote, and Senator Bernie Sanders patting Kennedy on the back since he “understands” that “the food industry makes billions of dollars by getting our children addicted to unhealthy food, which causes diabetes and a bunch of other illnesses.” (Booker is also a longstanding critic of the food industry.) Earlier this month, to the Washington Post, Sanders was more equivocal but still generous: “Some of [Kennedy’s] thoughts, I think, are absolutely right. They’re important. And some of them are dead wrong and dangerous.”
Such qualified responses about an utterly unqualified candidate are disturbing.
More on that, but first, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website.
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Trump Has Little Power to Make Drastic Voting Changes: Joshua A. Douglas, University of Kentucky law professor, notes that America’s decentralized election system disempowers the incoming president from implementing radical reforms. Click here for the full story.
As Trump Readies to Return, He Faces a Weaker Russia, China, and Iran: James D. Zirin, former federal prosecutor, analyzes the fallout from the fall of the Syrian dictatorship. Click here for the full story.
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“You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”
That’s a critique of American environmental policy with which you might agree. But you wouldn’t have ever appointed its author, Osama bin Laden, to run the Environmental Protection Agency because he was a mass murderer with many other crackpot views.
Kennedy of course is not a mass murderer. But he is a crackpot. His dangerous beliefs are not offset by his reasonable beliefs. On the contrary, his occasional reasonableness is leveraged to normalize his dangerousness.
Back in 2023, I urged political reporters not to legitimize his campaign. I reminded readers of his remark:
Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did … Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.
Kennedy apologized for that line, then quickly retracted it once the media heat had subsided. He never apologized or retracted what followed, which I summarized as follows:
Kennedy went far beyond an insensitive reference to the Holocaust. He said the combination of low-orbit satellites, 5G broadband cellular networks, digital currency, and vaccine passports would create a world in which we all would be worse off than Anne Frank, who—Kennedy neglected to mention—was captured by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp
l also noted:
Nuttiness may be subjective, but truthfulness is not. Kennedy and his anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense have been repeatedly busted for false and misleading tactics by FactCheck.org. His group has wrongly claimed that “some tetanus vaccines are actually part of a covert plot to control population growth by rendering women of childbearing age infertile” and used debunked links between vaccines and autism to sow distrust about COVID-19 vaccines in the African-American community.
Today, to smooth his path to confirmation, Kennedy is trying to convince doubters he won’t take anyone’s vaccine away. Per the Journal:
His team is hoping to assuage senators’ concerns about his criticism of vaccines, according to people familiar with his strategy. He is likely to tell senators that, if confirmed to lead HHS, he isn’t planning to take anyone’s vaccines away and instead wants to promote transparent, safe, effective vaccines, the people said.
That’s in line with what he told NBC News right after the election:
If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information So I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.
This is the opposite of reassuring. Kennedy may not literally take a vaccine off of the market. But he may very well push junk science under the auspices of the federal government, injecting baseless doubt into the minds of Americans, reducing the number of vaccinated, undermining herd immunity, and worsening the nation’s overall public health.
We have seen this play in American Samoa five years ago. Following years of sinking vaccination rates, from about 90 to 33 percent of infants–fueled by misinformation from anti-vaccination activists including from Kennedy’s organization–the territory suffered a measles outbreak. After 16 people died from measles, Kennedy told the Samoan prime minister that the vaccine itself was to blame. But the death toll rose to 83. It took a new vaccination campaign, getting the rate back up over 90 percent, to stem the disease.
Treating Kennedy like a well-meaning chap with whom Democrats sometimes disagree gives him undeserved credibility. And credibility is what he needs to carry out his crackpot ideas.
It’s bad enough that Trump has been normalized. Let’s not do the same for a person on the verge of sabotaging our public health system.
Best,
Bill
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