The New Dark Age

Sargent: That’s rough stuff. And Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell called RFK a “charlatan,” and other Dems brutally exposed him in many other ways. Matt, what did you make of those exchanges?

Gertz: Well, look, I think that they are a body blows to Robert F. Kennedy’s credibility. After all, these are conservative Republicans, strong supporters of President Trump, but also medical doctors who understand that what Kennedy has been doing has really been ripping away at the fabric of the U.S. health system and the nation’s ability to fight serious infectious diseases and threatening the vaccine regimen that protects our children and all of us from those diseases. I will say, though, it’s unfortunate that they’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something to be worried about here after they already voted to confirm him. It’s not like it’s somehow a surprise that Robert F. Kennedy is an anti-vax kook. That has been his political project for the last decade and a half. He and the nonprofit that he oversaw were at the forefront of trying to reduce Americans’ trust in vaccines and in pushing the false claim that vaccines cause autism in children.

Sargent: Well, Matt, I will tell you what. I think that these Republican senators probably went to RFK and went to Trump before the vote on him and said, You can’t really go too far with this stuff. We’ve got to support you because we’re all with President Trump and so forth, but you really can’t let this get out of hand, man. And then all of a sudden they see they’ve got a full-blown sociopath destroying public health in this country, and they’re like, Oh ****. Now I don’t mean to let them off the hook, but—

Gertz: No, of course. I think the problem is once they voted for him, they gave up the power that they had over him. Now he’s in that position. Donald Trump shows no indication of wanting to remove him. So absent the House attempting to impeach him and the Senate removing him from office, which just seems like comical in its plausibility, there isn’t really a lot they can do other than express their deep concern with the person that they have put in such a position of power.

Sargent: Well, they certainly have a lot to friggin explain for doing that. A lot of deaths on their hands as well. You looked at a bunch of the chyrons that Fox News was running during this hearing. One quoted RFK angrily accusing a Democratic senator of making stuff up about his vaccine stance. Another chyron on Fox suggests that it’s wrong to say RFK is denying people vaccines. And as you noticed, Fox ran that latter chyron pretty relentlessly throughout much of the questioning. Matt, can you talk about that? And what else did you see on Fox News along these lines?

The Ignoramus-in-Chief, and his deranged medical adviser, Dr. Wormbrain.


View: https://x.com/BioRecTech/status/1970235935943270746

I've never seen a more unqualified person for his job than RFK.

Also, I think weird voice to republican has to be a life pipeline. It's probably pretty alienating to sound that stupid, which leads to be evil ****** people

Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, RFK, Trump, Elon Musk. There are probably others.

Trump’s war against climate change science will allow History to judge him as having committed crimes against humanity, and against all life in Earth.

And his war on medical science is astonishing. I still have not figured out what his purpose is in destroying medical research in the United States. Any American praising this assault on human knowledge is a collaborator in crimes against humanity, IMHO.


A second novel element is the sabotage of America by an American president and his American partners. They apparently seek to bring down America in order to consolidate their power at home and allow their foreign autocratic allies to prosper. Many dictators have over time created situations conducive to mass ignorance, impoverishment, and disease. Here we have a focused and intense effort to set America back a generation in education, health, research, and climate policy, and eradicate foreign assistance that brought America goodwill abroad.

Science and medicine are areas in which the Trump administration’s departure from the traditions of elected autocrats is most evident. Almost all autocrats politicize science and medicine. The history of Nazi racial science and the Soviet practice of deploying mental health professionals to have dissenters committed to psychiatric institutions are two examples.

Yet most dictatorships proceed more gradually to change the institutional framework in which science and medicine are practiced. They close down some universities and research centers, and start others to do the kind of work that is in line with their ideological goals. The Nazis did not create the Reich Ministry for Education and Science until May 1934, fourteen months after the Enabling Act.

Other than in a post-coup or post-revolution environment, launching a wrecking ball on science immediately after you take office, as Trump has done, is unusual. So is naming a conspiracy theorist as Secretary of Health and Human Services who engineered the departures of ¼ of his department (20,000 workers!) in just four months. The speed and resolve to pull federal money for research, and curtail the work of America’s most prestigious institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health, has been shocking.

Trump and MAGA are Americans doing this to America. That’s sabotage on an unprecedented level, and not enough media outlets are writing about it in these terms or asking why this is happening.

The rush to ruin America is real enough to scientists and public health practitioners. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports 479 attacks on science from January to August, and grant approval and funding processes increasingly politicized to destroy programs and activities in environmental justice, LGBTQ+ health, and other objectionable areas.

“In rapid bursts, Mr. Trump has also laid off large teams of scientists, pulled the plugon thousands of research projects and proposed deep spending cuts for new studies,” the New York Times reported in late August, adding that next year’s proposed $44 billion budget cut would be “the largest drop in federal support for science since World War II.”

Let’s repeat that: the Trump administration wants to bring about the largest drop in federal support for American science since World War II. You’ve got to have a real thirst to end America’s superpower status to want such an ambitious cut. You’ve got to really want other nations to thrive.

But science has been “long a key driver of the US’s global pre-eminence,” as Guardian journalist Robert Tait writes, and so it has to be destroyed. And the purge must be so thorough that it will take decades to recover.