The appropriate response to RFK Jr. is to destroy him

RFK Jr. semi-apologist and apostle to the skeptical liberals Daniela Lamas, “a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston” has yet another NYT op-ed entitled “Kennedy Wants to Cure Chronic Disease: Here’s What He’s Up Against.”

Yes I know columnists don’t write their headlines, but the piece itself fully reflects the kafkaesque absurdity of this one.

What would it take to end the chronic disease epidemic in children and adults as our new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has promised?

“Curing chronic disease,” let alone an imaginary “chronic disease epidemic” — words have meanings, especially technical scientific terms like “epidemic,” and there is no “chronic disease epidemic in children and adults” in this country. Let’s go to the CDC for that definition, since it still exists for the moment despite the best efforts of RFK Jr. to destroy it:

Epidemic refers to an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area. 

RFK is an utter charlatan and fraud, and the whole key to his schtick is that Americans “used to be” healthy but now they’re not — hence the current “epidemic of chronic disease” — because of Big Pharma and Big Food and not enough fresh air and exercise.

This of course is just a repetition of the entire thesis of the Trumpist MAGA doctrine in a specific context. Now what the MAGA doctrine never specifies is precisely when America was “great,” compared to today. If it ever did so critics could point out with more precision that this supposed Golden Age was anything but. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of public health.

Since the 1950s tend to be the unconscious baseline for so many MAGA ethno-nationalists when they indulge in their fascist fantasy of a departed American golden age, for very obvious reasons — American was much, much whiter 70 years ago than it is today — I invite anyone to compare the health of the American population then to its state today by any metric other than the phony one that asserts that fat people have disease [sic] because they’re fat.

That comparison will reveal how utterly absurd it is to claim that Americans “used to be” healthier than they are today.

Not to mention, but I will, that the whole frame for public health discussion of wanting to “cure chronic disease” is too idiotic for words. You might as well aim to “cure” old age, or genetics, or humanity itself of the curse of physical imperfection, which in point of fact is the age-old dream of eugenicists and Nazis of every stripe. And that in turn is the real ideology behind RFK Jr.’s insane beliefs (along with the outright grifting.)

It’s not exactly a coincidence that Kennedy shares this particular delusion with Musk and Thiel and the rest of the Silicon Demigods, who are going to live forever on Mars, or inside a computer program, or by imbibing the life-extending blood of Aryan teenagers.

These people are literally Nazis, and the sooner Dr. Lamas & Co. recognize that the better.