Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sure is lucky in his timing. The former Democrat turned MAGA conspiracy theorist has a series of meetings with Senate Republicans and insurance company executives this week in an effort to create a clean pathway to confirmation as Donald Trump’s secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS). He was already benefitting from credulous coverage from mainstream news organizations repackaging his open hatred of medical science as “tough” on Big Pharma or “promoting” healthy diets, all of which is flat-out false. As journalist Michael Hobbes noted on Bluesky, “Pundits keep pretending that RFK Jr is ‘anti Big Pharma’ but that is just what anti-vaxxers say to make their ideas seem palatable. He constantly promotes Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, both of which are produced by pharma companies.” Then the nation’s attention was drawn to the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down on a New York City street on his way to a shareholder meeting.
People’s anger at the health care system can easily be hijacked, turning them away from the real source of their pain — for-profit insurance companies — and towards conspiracy theories, such as Kennedy’s false claims that vaccines are dangerous and don’t work.
The alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, has turned into a folk hero in some corners, as people point out that health insurers kill exponentially more people when they deny coverage simply to make more money. Wherever one falls in the moral debate over the public reaction, there can be no doubt that the shooting has ignited a national discussion about the widespread frustration and lack of trust Americans have in our health care systems. There are two directions the conversation can go now. This could be an opportunity to educate the public about the evils of for-profit health care and to create political will to replace private insurance companies with government-run systems that save money and lives. Or it could be a chance for nefarious forces to redirect people’s attention to conspiracy theories, paranoid nonsense, and outright delusions. Trump, Kennedy and their fellow MAGA conspiracists want the second option. Progressives should be forceful in seizing this moment to keep Kennedy from using it to set back American healthcare by decades.
Trump’s instinct to seize on conspiracy theories to sow division and paranoia kicked in again on Monday, telling reporters there are “problems” with vaccine and, “If you look at autism, so 30 years ago we had I heard numbers like 1 in 200,000, 1 in 100,000. Now I’m hearing numbers like 1 in 100. So something’s wrong. There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it.” Of course, the actual answer is well-known in scientific communities, where the issue has been studied for years, showing vaccines are safe and rising rates of autism are largely about shifts in diagnostic techniques. But Trump understands that fascism is more popular in societies where people reject facts and science, and so cannot help but seize on every opportunity to spread more lies.
The precarity of the situation goes right back to the incoherent politics of Mangione himself. Before he was caught, a lot of pundits, both left and right, assumed the shooter must be a leftist, because of the anti-capitalist bent of the “deny, delay, and depose” messaging left on the bullet casings at the scene. After he was arrested, however, it became clear he had a Joe Rogan-style mish-mash of opinions, all over the political map. Writer Mark Harris called him “a very recognizable type of young male ideology tourist.” As Peter Rothpletz at the Guardian explained:
Mangione’s Twitter/X account is a kaleidoscopic fever dream with no clear ideological rudder. It seems he has a genuine interest in health and wellness. “Wokeness” and masculinity are occasionally discussed; so too are climate change, psychedelics and the potential risks and rewards of artificial intelligence. Pornography, in Mangione’s mind, “should be regulated no less than alcohol, cigarettes, and travel” – and certain sex toys should be banned. He likes Joe Rogan but disdains Jordan Peterson.
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A lot of people are like Mangione in this regard, ready to latch onto random explanations for their discontent, with little regard to whether it’s factual or logical. People’s anger at the health care system can easily be hijacked, turning them away from the real source of their pain — for-profit insurance companies — and towards conspiracy theories, such as Kennedy’s false claims that vaccines are dangerous and don’t work. In many ways, Kennedy’s lies are even more attractive. Changing the gargantuan insurance industry is a daunting task. Convincing yourself you don’t need medicine if you just drink raw milk is a much lower bar for entry, even if it’s utterly idiotic.
Over the weekend, CNN interviewed Kennedy booster Zen Honeycutt, who founded the anti-science group Moms Across America. She believes “we won’t even need health care” if Kennedy gets rid of vaccines and other crank bugaboos like genetically modified foods. “We won’t be going to doctors,” Honeycutt said with a straight face, “because we won’t be sick.” Like most of these conspiracy theorists, she paints a picture of halcyon days before pasteurization, vaccines and modern farming practices. In reality, of course, life expectancy was under 50 years old in 1900, because of the prevalence of diseases that are now easily prevented.
Kennedy hasn’t said anything about Mangione, even though the alleged murderer hinted at his support for Kennedy’s failed presidential run on Twitter back in July. But Kennedy doesn’t need to. The widespread interest in Mangione and his motivations is enough to focus people’s minds on their health care anxieties, priming more of them to back Kennedy’s conspiracy theories as merely a “bold” way to tackle the health care issue. Kennedy makes it worse with his misleading “Make America Healthy Again” slogan, which has led to alarmingly high levels of support among voters who clearly have no idea that Kennedy’s anti-vaccination and anti-regulation agenda would make Americans much sicker.
With the shooting in the news, progressives have a chance to capture people’s attention and direct it toward real solutions. Unfortunately, that is being stepped on by the exaggerated horror the Beltway press and mainstream politicians are exhibiting over the dark humor that some on social media responded to the shooting with. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., offered what should have been a non-controversial take, that the “visceral response” from the public “should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.” She explicitly said “Violence is never the answer,” but argued it was inevitable when people “lose faith in the ability of their government to make change.” In response, both Republicans and Democrats disingenuously lashed out at her, pretending that she was valorizing murder, instead of trying to prevent it by discussing root causes.
Republicans do not oppose violence, which is why they are currently celebrating Daniel Penny, who was acquitted of murder despite killing a homeless man in front of a subway car full of witnesses. What they are worried about is that this shooting might lead to real shifts in public opinion around health care, to the point where voters might finally be ready to back an option like Medicare-for-All. They’re just exploiting the Pollyannaish tendencies among Democratic leaders to shame progressives into silence. This is no different than when Republicans pretend it’s disrespectful to talk about gun control after a mass shooting. Republicans use these shaming-and-silencing techniques because they know they would lose any open and honest debate about policy. There is no reason for Democrats to go along with it.
One way or another, Americans are talking about health care right now. If progressives stay silent, that leaves a vacuum that will only be filled with the conspiratorial nonsense Kennedy peddles. It would be nice if the occasion for a public debate about health care were kicked off by something other than a cold-blooded murder, of course. But waiting for a less icky opportunity means ceding the ground to people who want to make the structural problems much worse. Kennedy may present like a man out to “reform” the healthcare industry, but in reality, he’s meeting with insurance executives at Mar-a-Lago. Kennedy’s ideology is a neat fit for a predatory insurance industry. He blames vaccines and “poor” diets for people’s illnesses — a blame-the-victim mentality that suits the executive goal of denying even more health care to ordinary Americans.
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