Resignation is Not Enough.
It Cannot Stop with RFK Jr., Either.
“Interrupt the flow of information and create confusion...That isn’t the means to their objective. That is their objective. This is nothing more than terrorism in a coup’s clothing” -Patlabor 2 (1993)
Across the media, many elected Democrats are demanding that Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tender his resignation. This is understandable, as RFK Jr. has proven himself to be woefully incompetent, morally depraved, and frankly, acting like a child. From beef tallow fries to ice cream to soda, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is weirdly obsessed with junk food. Yet, unsurprising!
With zero real-world knowledge of medicine, science, or nutrition, it’s not shocking that RFK Jr. devotes his energy to what he and every other anti-vaccine crank does best: parade themselves around the media, arrogantly talking ignorantly about complicated problems that lack easy, simple answers. The HHS Secretary is willfully neglecting his sworn duties and exploiting the office to promote himself and his friends’ scams. Upon leaving office, RFK Jr. will exploit his newfound fanbase to personally enrich himself for millions of dollars, just as he did before being sworn in.
This is unacceptable.
The damage has already been done: vaccination rates are declining, measles is on the rise - killing multiple American children this year, and other diseases such as whooping cough are also surging. COVID-19 is still running wild, killing Americans at a steady clip and continuing to disable Americans in 2025, with booster uptake dreadfully low. To suggest that RFK Jr. merely resign and rake in millions from this rising tide of pestilence would simply be rewarding him for his grave misconduct.
This is a clear-cut case of fraud; a grave violation against the physical bodies that make up the nation known as the United States of America. A surrender of our children to the once-defeated tyranny of infectious diseases. The demonizing of doctors and scientists, and the lionizing of scam artists and abusive creeps. The “Demon Haunted World” Carl Sagan warned us about has finally been realized.
What is the Democrats’ plan to finally put a stop to this chicanery? They’ve wasted the past decade offering nothing, assuming that scolding voters to the polls would deliver a sustainble electoral victory. They needed a once-in-a-century pandemic, grossly mismanaged, to barely eke out a victory in 2020. After promising to “follow the science,” the Biden Administration let Wall Street dictate a failed vaccine-only pandemic response which disabled countless millions of Americans, abandoned without support, treatment, or any hope of a cure for their condition. This achieved little more than helping Donald Trump win a second Presidential term, and post-acute COVID-19 overtaking asthma as the leading chronic illness in kids.
Whoopsie!
It was not that long ago when Nancy Pelosi laughed as she reassured health insurance lobbyists that the Democrats would never pursue widely-demanded single-payer healthcare. This remains a country where a woman can have a beer glass smashed in her face by a literal uniformed Nazi and she still has to beg strangers online for help with debilitating medical debt. That is the nation Democrats have safeguarded on behalf of health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical executives.
This unspeakable horror, left unchecked for literal decades, was the perfect environment for the anti-vaccine movement to recruit loyal soldiers for its war on science. The HHS Secretary and his goon squad are simply continuing this fine tradition of exploiting the federal government to enrich private interests, betraying the needs of the American people. It just so happens to be on behalf of a different flavor of scam artist.
The longer you allow a crisis to get worse, the bolder of a response is required. The opposition party must be frank with the public about what the end result of Trump & RFK Jr.’s war on science and medicine results in: Dead American children. More cancer deaths. A rising tide of pestilence. Whoever replaces Trump will be facing a generational public health crisis, and heavens forbid another pandemic disaster kicks off as a result of our collapsing climate.
Capital is not a fan of public health. They bankrolled a horrific torrent of propaganda against COVID-19 mitigations, minimizing the virus’ harms, and paving the way for the current war on science. Letting them dictate healthcare policy has been an absolute disaster for the American people. A refusal to fight for a meaningful alternative, such as Medicare-4-All, is simply an endorsement of the depravity that gave anti-vaccine sadists the opportunity to seize power. Enough is enough.
So, what would a meaningful alternative to our current medical establishment actually look like? How do we rebuild America’s credibility as a leader of medicine and science? What steps must be taken to ensure that someone like RFK Jr. is prevented from taking power ever again?
Purges & Prosecutions
We are all learning a hard lesson in real-time of what happens when you replace qualified doctors and scientists with loudmouthed Twitter jackasses. Week after week, the American public is bombarded with headlines showing chaos at our federal public health agencies. Chaotic melodrama and immature antics cover for sheer incompetency and low morale. The frequency of such headlines is unprecedented and truly concerning.
Civil servants, such as the leadership of the Food & Drug Administration or the National Institutes of Health, have a sworn duty to serve the public trust. Neglecting one’s responsibilities to go off podcasting, while collecting a paycheck from the American taxpayer, is an act of fraud and should be prosecuted as such. Legitimizing the myths of cranks such as Andrew Wakefield, to publicly demonstrate your loyalty to Trump over science, is completely indefensible.
It would be a completely foolish self-inflicted wound to let any appointee to federal public health agency under Trump remain, as they have all displayed a universally pitiful penchant for grave misconduct. As the past quarter century of Democrats’ cowardice in prosecuting blatant violations of the law by Republicans and Wall Street has shown, a refusal to crack down on anti-vaccine shenanigans has only emboldened them. A dramatic shift is long past due.
A Legislative Revolution
You wouldn’t know it by following mainstream pundits, but there’s a legislative war going on against the health of you and your loved ones. Idaho has essentially outlawed public health mitigations in any form, and hundreds of bills are currently being legislated throughout the country in order to surrender our children to the tyranny of life-threatening diseases. Yet, the Democrat Party has been essentially silent, passively endorsing the anti-vaccine war on science and medicine. This must change.
The monetization of social media discourse around real-world issues of life and death has been a horrific failure for our society. Spewing an endless stream of hatred and bigotry has become a financially lucrative grift in American society, providing nothing of value while leeching off the backs of actual working families. This is far from the definition of “free speech,” intellectual discourse, or anything of positive value. Often times, this inspires real-world violence that ends in innocent lives being stolen away, while the propagandists smugly cashing checks with zero accountability. This must come to an end.
The demonization of doctors and scientists, essential pillars of civil society, as part of an irrational witchhunt, is a fast track towards societal suicide. Platforms such as Twitter, Youtube, and Substack have happily turned a blind eye, raking in profits from platforming & enabling hate. It’s clear that strong legislative regulations are necessary in order to suppress fact-free propaganda narratives, and defend the free exchange of actual knowledge and constructive ideas. If a public health scientist is harassed and threatened into silence, while those spewing such garbage are financially rewarded for doing so, then these platforms are not serving the public interest. Any number of hours of podcast clips from leading tech billionaires shows that these supposed “Captains of Industry” are anything but; morally depraved and making our society worse.
More importantly, we need to start looking at the anti-vaccine grift as the Big Tobacco of our generation. Demonizing vaccines and encouraging infectious disease outbreaks, especially amongst children, is an incredibly lucrative grift. Quack cures and unregulated supplements (Thanks Ron Paul, another shining “achievement” of libertarianism) require sick kids and worried parents, taking medical advice from “influencers” and short-form video ads instead of their pediatrician.
Ask yourself, why should a child’s life be thrown away because their gullible parent listened to some emotionally manipulative social media crank who screeched that vaccines would give their kid autism?
The same anti-vaccine quacks crying for “medical freedom” are in fact evidence of the need for stronger, stricter public health mandates.
Mehmet Oz, a daytime talkshow scam artist who now leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has paid out literal millions of dollars in settlements for blatantly misleading his audience. At what point does a blatant scam artist such as this not wind up in prison? We have a significant chunk of the population that is wasting their lives ripping off their fellow American and sabotaging the hard work of medical professionals instead of doing something of value with their lives. Why shouldn’t the law be dropping the hammer on these cranks and putting them out of business?
The Majesty of Mitigations
One of the great crimes of our media establishment these past five years is how they legitimized and at times even endorsed the many lies of the anti-vaccine war on science. By putting these cranks out of business, and establishing a wave of regulations to defend the public’s health against such exploitation crankery, we can finally stop wasting time (and lives) humoring unscientific quackery and focus on meaningful improvements to the public’s health. Those who demonized COVID-19 mitigations did nothing to keep schools & businesses open, and took no responsibility when their fantasies resulted in needless preventable deaths.
We need to stop entertaining the irrational rantings of boneheaded pestilence sycophants as legitimate commentary.
It was not so long ago that the Chief Medical Officer for an aristocrat-controlled German port city blatantly lied to the public and claimed that nothing could be done to prevent cholera outbreaks, getting thousands killed as a result of his incompetence. Well before 2020, we knew of engineering solutions to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses such as SARS-CoV-2. A decade before COVID-19 emerged on our shores and a significant subset of the population put on pom-poms and miniskirts to cheerlead for the virus, medical research showed that mass infection with a SARS virus would disable a significant percentage of the population.
Yet, those who denied these basic facts were treated with kid gloves and treated as legitimate, “evidence-based” thinkers worth taking seriously, instead of casually dismissed like you would any flat-earther or “psychic medium.” With some of the loudest now in our charge of our federal public health agencies, child abusers such as Andrew Wakefield and lecherous creeps like neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker are gleefully celebrating. Yet, we have not an ounce of remorse from more “legitimate” voices such as Leana Wen (WaPo), Michael Mina, Zeynep Tufekci (NYT), and Ashish Jha (Biden’s 2nd COVID Czar) for endorsing such quackery.
Things will only begin to get better when we stop playing games with the Demon-Haunted World that Carl Sagan warned us about and focus our energies upholding and defending the best of scientific innovation. Government can lead the way in implementing mitigations to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which includes better ventilation & air filtration, farUVC lighting, and yes, respirator mandates when community transmission is on the upswing.
We legally require children to recieve an education, in one form or another, yet for countless families, they’ve suffered an unforgivable trauma as a result. For countless children who brought COVID-19 home from school, they played a central role in the death of a parent. Many kids are now disabled and have given up their dreams. Countless parents will never see their child grow into adulthood, fall in love, or raise another generation - because their innocent souls were stolen by a virus that outspoken narcissists foolishly claimed was harmless to their little ones.
At a most essential, basic moral level as civilized human beings, we owe it to future generations to leave the world in a better place than the one we inherited. Yet, from delusions about “immunity debt” (blaming NPIs for the impacts of COVID-19) to ensuring climate collapse will trigger enough pandemic disaster, we’re throwing out the advantages so many brilliant minds before us ensured.
This is a completely unacceptable regression. A better world is possible. Let’s fight for it, demanding better of one another, and refusing to tolerate our worst excesses.
Closing Thoughts
A man is only as smart as what he understands he doesn’t know. Growing up shoveling cattle manure, and spending a decade in advertising, there’s a great deal you don’t learn. Yet, you can be humble and embrace new knowledge from people who have dedicated their lives to different pursuits and grow your mind. The modern anti-vaccine war on science, however, demands that you reject factual analysis for emotional outbursts.
This is a form of political control, plain and simple. Trapping people’s minds in a prison of absurd fantasies, so they might abuse and possibly even murder your critics, is an indefensible violation against civic society. It’s long past due we pull the emergency brake.
Everyone who warned you that these anti-vaccine cranks were incompetent masturbatory ghouls was completely right. Perhaps, we should try listening to their suggestions instead of the most abrasive, ignorant jackasses on social media and corporate media outlets? Or are we going to continue prioritizing this boorish pseudo-intellectual “combat” over finally growing up and acting like adults?
America is presently suffering under a medical establishment helmed by loudmouth dickheaded Twitter jackasses. A historic, yet entirely needless experiment. We must focus our energies on ensuring this mistake is never repeated.
