Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nowhere Near As Good At Bullsh*tting As He Thinks He Is
He's got the NYT fooled, but not anyone who actually pays attention to him.
As if things have not been batshit enough as of late, we got to end the work week with not one, not two, but three RFK Jr. hearings — before the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday and before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Friday. This meant that I got to watch at least six hours of America’s least favorite gravelly voiced, raccoon-dick-cutting, anti-vaccine, never-nude conspiracy theorist be impossibly condescending to anyone trying to get a straight answer from him about anything.
Naturally, The New York Times made a heroic effort to sane-wash Kennedy, breathlessly reporting that he had “shifted his tone” during the hearings on Thursday by “admitting” that the measles vaccine is safe “for most people” and that getting measles is not good, writing:
In back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Kennedy testified that the measles vaccine is safe and effective “for most people” and agreed it was safer than getting measles. Under questioning, he also allowed that the vaccine might have saved the lives of two unvaccinated children who died of measles in Texas earlier this year.
His comments, while carefully couched, stand in stark contrast to his previous statements about vaccination. Coupled with Mr. Trump’s announcement of Dr. Erica Schwartz, a deputy surgeon general in his first administration, as his new pick for C.D.C. director, they provided the latest evidence yet that Mr. Kennedy is trying to publicly put his efforts to overhaul American vaccine policy behind him.
Is he though? I think we can be pretty sure he is not.
This is the same “tone” he puts on every time he’s forced to talk about his nonsense in front of people who are not of his tribe. It’s the same “tone” he used to convince Sen. Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor, that he totally wouldn’t mess with vaccines or claim they cause autism during his confirmation hearing, which he obviously went on to do. The “for most people” is a dog-whistle, and the anti-vaxxers know exactly what he means when he says that. It means that “Sure, it will be fine for most, but some kids will become autistic and you need to decide for yourself whether or not that is a risk you want to take.”
There was also not a tone-shift in his defensiveness or in his condescension to Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pennsylvania), to whom he was responding.
He even tried to claim that the increase in measles deaths was not on him, as many of the children who contracted the virus were around five or so years old. Rather, he says, it was because people lost trust in vaccines after COVID. Of course, the reason that happened was because of people like Kennedy fear-mongering about it.
Even if that were not the case, the decrease in children getting vaccinated means that herd immunity is far more difficult to maintain, so unvaccinated children are more likely to get it than they would be in an environment where a high percentage of people were vaccinated.
Additionally, saying “it’s possible” that the measles vaccine would have saved the lives of those children is not some kind of major admission, either. He could have had the same answer if the question was “Would cutting off a dead raccoon’s penis have saved the lives of those children?” because technically, anything is possible.
In the past, Mr. Kennedy has said vaccination should be a personal choice, and advised parents of newborns to “do your own research” before deciding whether to vaccinate children. During the measles outbreak, he acknowledged that the vaccine was the best way to prevent transmission, but steered clear of pronouncing it safe and effective.
Except the “for most people” and the “it’s possible” are the “do your own research”-es here.
Far less easy to fool than The New York Times was Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who had some questions for Kennedy regarding a 2024 interview he did on the YouTube show High Lvl Conversations, hosted by “wellness” influencer 19Keys, in which he had some real interesting ideas about sending Black children to rural “wellness farms” to get “reparented.”
Via The Daily Beast:
At one point during the conversation, Kennedy, 72, said that if elected, he would create “Wellness Farm” rehabilitation facilities in rural areas all around the country.
“Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRI, benzos, which are known to induce violence. And those children are going to have a chance to go somewhere to get reparented,” said Kennedy, who now serves as President Donald Trump’s health secretary.
During a congressional hearing Thursday about his department’s budget, Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama read Kennedy’s comment back to him and asked if he had ever parented or “re-parented a Black child.”
Naturally, Kennedy just insisted that he had never said any such thing and didn’t even know what that meant, and got very agitated about it. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if perhaps he’s got some Valium rage of his own.
Conveniently, however, the recording is online and it even has subtitles. He actually brought it up twice, so it’s hardly as though he misspoke. If he now does not know what he meant by that, perhaps he’s got some cognitive issues of his own to deal with.
“So, you are not a doctor, have no formal medical training, and you’ve never parented a Black child,” Sewell said. “And yet you are suggesting that the federal government should take Black children away from their families and ‘reparent’ them, and send them off to some wellness farm instead of providing them with evidence-based…”
Clearly averse to the phrase “evidence-based,” the aspiring Father Flanagan immediately interrupted her and accused her of having made it all up, which she did not. She attempted to ask him several more questions about those statements, and he kept accusing her of making up the whole thing and insisting that he doesn’t even know what reparenting is. Except he clearly did know what he was talking about when he did that interview, because he went on for some time about how the plan would be to send adolescents who are “addicted” to either street drugs or the medications prescribed by their doctors to farms in order to “rehabilitate” them with child labor, organic food, and lack of access to “screens.”
I would like to point out, by the way, that Black children and adolescents are actually medicated at far lower rates than are white children — and, in fact, are underdiagnosed and undertreated for mental and behavioral health issues, thanks to the usual disparities in our healthcare system. But hey! Who needs facts when you have “vibes,” am I right?
During his hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Friday, Kennedy continued his assault on psychiatric medications and ceased any attempts to “shift his tone” on the subject of vaccines.
Indeed, when asked by Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Michigan) about the ways he’d attempted to restrict access to vaccines, his tone was somehow even more condescending than it was on Thursday.
“You questioned the effectiveness of the measles vaccine, and then in September, your handpicked vaccine panel voted against recommending the combined measles vaccine for children under 4,” Stevens said.
“It was dangerous,” Kennedy responded, incorrectly. He then asked her if she thought we should be giving children vaccines that were not “safety-tested,” which is not true of the MMR vaccine. It has been in use for decades and we know that it is safe and far, far less of a risk than actually getting the diseases it prevents.
Both Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Georgia) and Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Connecticut) asked Kennedy about the gun violence epidemic, which he insisted was not his problem at Health and Human Services.
Rep. Hayes, pointing out that funding for various gun violence prevention programs like the Safer Communities Act had been cut, asked the secretary what he had done to keep children safe from gun violence.
His answer? We did a study on something everyone already knows is bullshit.
“We did a study on school shootings, looked at what the shooters have in common, what medications they may have been receiving, whether they were on SSRIs, whether they were on benzos. We’re expanding that now across the, across the agency to do even more of those,” Kennedy told Rep. Hayes.
Will someone please tell this man that doctors are not going around indiscriminately prescribing “benzos” to teenagers? Only 1.8 percent of anyone under 18 has ever been given a single “benzo” by a doctor, and almost exclusively for epileptic seizures or truly acute anxiety attacks.
Rep. McBath, who lost a son to gun violence, pointedly asked Kennedy to estimate how many kids last year died from “fluoride toxicity” versus gun violence, pointing out that gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and adolescents. Failing to get the point, he merely whined that her question was absurd because he never said fluoride kills people.
“What I don't know is how you can expect the American people to take your opinion seriously when you try to tell them that they don't need to worry about the leading cause of death for their kids,” she said, “while you tour the country to talk about the supposed dangers of fluoride. You should focus your efforts on things that are really killing our children in this country every single day.”
As far as Black maternal mortality was concerned, Rep. Summer Lee asked Kennedy how he intended to deal with the fact that Black women are disproportionately likely to die in childbirth if no one is allowed to say “Black” because of the administration’s anti-DEI nonsense that eliminated funding for all studies and interventions mentioning the word “Black.”
“Do you think consuming more protein and avoiding Tylenol will prevent Black women from being three times more likely to die during a pregnancy?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” he responded, “Tylenol doesn’t kill.”
“So then why aren't you putting forth serious policies that actually address the health crises in this country instead of just these unserious conspiracy theories and this wellness influencer mess?” she asked.
Kennedy responded by insisting that his plans to address maternal mortality for all women without regard to race were sufficient, which they are not.
It was quite clear that Kennedy’s position, and the position of this administration, is that it is better for Black women to disproportionately die in childbirth than it would be to upset whichever weird ass white people would feel “divided” if that issue were addressed for a single moment.
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That’s not too surprising, of course. One thing RFK Jr. has certainly made clear during his tenure at HHS is that he has no problem putting the health of anyone at risk so long as he gets to see his pseudoscientific dreams come true. He doesn’t care if people get sick from raw milk, if kids die from measles, if pregnant mothers suffer in pain without the only painkiller it is safe or them to take, if kids get shot, or if their teeth fall out.
All of these consequences are, to him, entirely worth it. He does not care about real problems or health consequences, he cares about getting his own way, and he does not care how many people have to die in order for that to happen.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I thought I couldn’t hate anyone more than Trump…and Killer Kennedy has achieved that…
Repeat comment from 3 days ago, posted because relevant, lightly edited.
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John Oliver had a wonderful takedown of RFK Jr on his show some months back.
There's one part of it I wonder about, though. Before getting into the awful stuff Kennedy has done, Oliver did an "he wasn't always all bad" thing -- he said how, early in his career, RFK Jr. had been an activist environmental lawyer, fighting for wetlands or whatever, and that had been a good thing -- but then RFK Jr went off the rails.
It seems likely to me that given what we know about him, ALL of that early stuff was cynical posturing -- at the time, being an environmentalist was a fast, easy way to virtue-signal and attract attention, not to mention ensure a steady supply of babes, washed-up whales, and roadkill bear cubs.
If this is the case, he's basically been a fraud for his whole adult life. It sure seems to be in character.