RFK Jr. is Maybe, Slightly, Right

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

It’s a matter of time before Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Elon Musk create an insuperable rift within the upcoming Trump administration. Musk believes that engineers and their technology will solve society’s problems with efficiency beyond anything government can accomplish, a philosophy called cyberlibertarianism. RFK, by contrast, distrusts science and technology, and wants to rescind 200 years of progress in physiology and medicine.

Left-leaning quarters of the internet have begun mocking RFK as part of our routine anti-Trump rhetoric. We ridicule his disdain for vaccines in the immediate wake of a pandemic made absurdly worse by an administration that hampered any efforts to curtail the spread. We disparage his fear of pharmaceuticals as indicative of his now-infamous brain worm, which maybe could’ve been prevented by medicine. Everything RFK says is automatically tainted.

Yet I suggest there’s something to his persistent appeal. People like RFK, and those like him who automatically distrust science, because he isn’t entirely wrong. RFK taps a fertile vein of public sentiment that realizes we’ve heard lies from people and institutions for years, clothed in the vestments of science, technology, and mathematics. Americans have become distrustful of authority, and not without reason. RFK simply identifies that distrust.

We’ve witnessed how industrialized pharmaceutical companies, the storied “Big Pharma,” have yanked patients’ chains for years. Nearly a decade ago, so-called “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli increased prices on life-saving diabetes medications, which weren’t rare or proprietary, simply to boost his own shoddy past investments. Malcolm Gladwell writes how Purdue Pharma created the “opioid epidemic” by targeting, not patients in pain, but doctors desperately lonely for human validation.

These highly visible forms of public manipulation only remain in public memory because they’re uncomplicated. More nuanced issues, like the sale of over-the-counter amphetamines as diet aides, or the whole fen-phen debacle, are harder to understand, and therefore harder to remember. We’ve wondered at shifting standards for diet and exercise: a few years ago, doctors told us small quantities of red wine were healthful. Now we’re told no quantity of alcohol is safe.

Elon Musk

What’s more, many of RFK’s concerns about food additives and processing reflect our own concerns. Many packaged and convenience foods are fortified with synthetic preservatives and wheat flour base to remain shelf-stable. Many are also fortified with synthetic flavor compounds, because the processing leaches out natural flavor. As Rampton and Stauber write, these additives are presumed safe only because they haven’t been proven unsafe, and are only lightly regulated.

And our government kowtows to the companies which produce these foods, pharmaceuticals, and other substances we put into their bodies. Across many years and both major parties, administrations have let industrial conglomerates like Pfizer, Unilever, Con-Agra, and Bayer run roughshod, only occasionally constrained when public outrage grows vocal enough to jeopardize politicians’ reelection chances. Almost like representatives care more about their donors’ demands than their constituents’ health.

This isn’t new, of course. Anybody who even fleetingly reads American history knows that, before the rise of antitrust regulation, the companies that manufactured drugs fortified their patent medications with arsenic, cocaine, and opium. Before Congress created the FDA, food companies stretched their packaged foods with sawdust and urine. Government stepped in to enforce baseline safety standards, but now hides behind regulations as opaque as the companies they purportedly regulate.

So yeah, RFK actually understands an important thread in American political discourse: the terror Americans feel at how much power these opaque corporations and government institutions have in our lives. We fear these corporate conglomerates, many of which own significant shareholder stakes in one another. We likewise fear the regulatory institutions which often appear as likely to protect as prosecute the corporations hurting us.

That doesn’t mean RFK is right, of course. His belief in the superiority of “natural immunity” over vaccines, to cite just one example, suggests he thinks people once shrugged off polio, smallpox, and the plague. This is goofy. Like belief in homeopathy or crystal resonances, belief in “natural immunity” only makes sense with a complete unawareness of the history of science and medicine. Thus RFK Jr. is worse than ignorant.

However, progressives ignore RFK’s underlying message at great political cost. Just as we disparaged the Wuhan Labs hypothesis simply because Trump said it, we’re now ignoring a history of institutional abuse of science, simply because RFK says it. If progressives want to reclaim these voters from the kooks who have hijacked it, we need to start by acknowledging their concerns. Because they aren’t wrong; powerful people have lied to us.