February 13, 2025 - 6:10pm
With the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donald Trump has added a key player to his team of brokenists.
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin popularised the concept of Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet as a “team of rivals,” but Trump has instead assembled a coalition of brokenists. In a viral 2022 essay, Alana Newhouse divided American politics into “status quoists,” who believe that most American institutions are essentially functional, and “brokenists,” who hold that “our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out.” More than any ideology, this sense of radical critique brings together a team as disparate as Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth.
Descended from one of the most storied families in American politics, RFK has become one of the leading avatars of brokenism. His environmental activism has grown into a full-spectrum suspicion of the American healthcare and food-production sectors. He has tilted against the “military industrial complex” as well as corporate America, and he has mused that the CIA was somehow involved in the assassinations of his uncle and father. In his aborted independent run for the presidency, Kennedy wrapped himself in these outsider themes.
Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump in August 2024 set the stage for a grand brokenist alliance and gave him considerable leverage in the new administration. Pushing Republican senators to confirm Kennedy, JD Vance said that RFK represented an important part of “the new coalition of our party.” In the Republican Party of the past, Kennedy’s former positions on abortion and gun control, among other issues, might have been disqualifying, but his stinging indictments of the American establishment have made him an important factional lieutenant for the GOP of the Trump era.
Trump knows how much he can lean on party loyalty as president, which makes RFK’s confirmation less surprising. The last Cabinet nominee to be defeated in a Senate vote while the president’s party held the Senate was a century ago, when Calvin Coolidge’s attorney general nominee was voted down. Some nominees have been withdrawn, but — given RFK’s role in the 2024 election — Trump had considerable incentive to stand with his nomination throughout.
RFK mustered the support of even Republican senators who were viewed as possible tossups, including Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. The only Republican to vote against RFK was Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader who has mounted a (sometimes lonely) campaign of resistance against Trump’s more-outsider nominees.
In announcing their support for Kennedy, many senators said that they hoped he could help drive down medical costs and speed up innovation in that sector. Many of these senators have also agreed with RFK that there needs to be a new approach to nutrition in order to combat obesity and chronic illness. In an op-ed endorsing RFK, Kansas senator Roger Marshall (a physician himself) praised the nominee for wanting to ensure that “all Americans have access to nutrient-dense whole foods, safe medicines and effective primary care along with addressing the soaring mental health crisis that our youth and young adults face.”
The healthy living parts of the MAHA agenda could garner congressional and public support. But Republican senators also drew a red line: vaccines. In that same op-ed, Marshall claimed that Kennedy “will not change vaccine policy.” Lisa Murkowski and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy (another doctor) made their support for RFK conditional on him not going to war against vaccines. An HHS-led campaign against vaccines could alienate another important part of the Republican coalition: the normie working families who signed onto the disruptor agenda in the first place out of frustration with the failures of the old institutional elite.
Kennedy’s appointment thus reveals the bigger challenge facing the brokenist coalition. Americans have turned to this disruptor alliance in hopes of a remedy to elite-led chaos. To avoid a similar political rebuke, brokenists will have to show that they can repair, not just destroy.
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SubscribeWhat would going to war against vaccines mean, I wonder?
End immunity from liability?
Require proper placebo-controlled trials?
There’s plenty to do here that most people would consider common sense.
How would doing those two things (and things like them) help? You say most people would consider them common sense. Why?
Many of us do not trust the medical establishment in general, and big pharma in particular, to have our best interests at heart. (I do trust them to be self-interested.) Oversight and accountability, along with rigorous scientific protocols, would help restore some of that lost trust.
Requiring proper placebo-controlled trials gives us the opportunity to learn two things. 1) How effective is the vaccine/or other medicine vs a placebo; and 2) What, if any, are the quantifiable negative side affects. Seems to me like common sense.
What do you mean by a “proper” placebo-controlled trial? What’s wrong with the placebo-controlled trials that take place now? What would learn from a “proper” trial that we don’t already know. We already know the answers to your two questions.
Seems like you’re trolling, but for anyone else wondering …
Saline is a proper placebo. Instead of that, vaccine trials often use previously-approved vaccines or adjuvants.
Vaccines are not subject to placebo controlled trials, only “versus existing vaccine” trials. It is said that “exposing people to a placebo rather than a trial vaccine is too dangerous for them (even though some of these are not deadly diseases as such). Therefore the dangers/effectiveness of the old vaccine stats mask the dangers of the 2nd by distorting effectiveness and side effects ccompared with a placebo trial.
Start with 13 billion in fines paid by Big Pharma in feloncy convictions over the last decade. Continue with evidence of drug trials outsourced overseas where impoverished participants are bullied into not reporting side effects. Add the farcical Covid vaccine trial period and efficacy. Finish with the fact Big Pharma is the least trusted industry on earth.
Stop gifting physicians luxury holidays in exotic locations on the pretext that you’re holding a ‘conference’?
The minimal tax savings to the physician from being able to consider airfare, hotel and 50% of meals and incidentals as business expenses is the only cost to the public purse of attending a conference at a luxury destination . And given that there really are conferences at the exotic locations offering sessions that fulfill professional relicensing requirements for continuing education, even somehow disallowing luxury destinations would only save the public purse the difference between those deductions for a conference at a luxury location and a conference at, say the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, multiplied by the physician’s top marginal tax rate. Physicians and other health care providers actually work hard and are very valuable, let them earn their CE credits in pleasant surroundings.
This is a disappointment. Bobby Kennedy is charismatic and convincing, but he is also conniving. He’s a trial lawyer, a mass tort lawyer, who makes money by distorting the truth. He blames other people for problems, he doesn’t solve them. He’s like John Edwards, the vice presidential and presidential candidate who was also a trial lawyer and whose narcissism and moral turpitudity led him to disgrace.
Bobby Kennedy is not just anti-science, he’s crazy anti-science. He doesn’t literally walk around wearing a tinfoil hat, but he does figuratively. He believes that radio waves — cell phone and Wi-Fi radio transmissions — break down the blood-brain barrier, cause cancer and otherwise wreak havoc with our health. He says there are hundreds, thousands, of studies that support his claims, but he’s lying. There are none. And common sense is enough to convince any sane person that he’s just flatly insane.
The list of Bobby Kennedy’s lies is maddeningly long, but his supporters don’t care. They want a disruptor who is going to root out all the rot and corruption that exists in the government health agencies. But with Bobby Kennedy rooting around, he’s going to do damage, not good. He doesn’t know enough to do good, and what he thinks he knows will cause him to do damage. Imagine a NASA administrator who believes that the moon landings were faked and that aliens crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Do you think that person could effectively do their job?
Bobby Kennedy is a modern-day Trofim Lysenko, whose rejection of Darwin and acceptance of Lamarck resulted in government policies that killed people through starvation. It’s impossible to predict how Bobby Kennedy will do as health secretary, but if his past and his beliefs are any guide, he’ll do the same kind of damage as his Soviet predecessor did. Shame on those who have gambled our health on this man.
Take vaccines, as an example. As this article notes, Bobby Kennedy has promised not to change vaccine policy. But does that mean that he has changed his mind about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines? No! He made clear at his hearing that he has not changed his mind. He still believes that vaccines are dangerous, and have killed many more people than they have saved. Do we want a health secretary who disagrees with the very policy he is implementing?
The vaccine issue also shows that Bobby Kennedy is a liar. In his congressional testimony, he said that there was a study that supported his view that vaccines cause autism, the Mawson study that had come out a few days before. What he didn’t say, but ethically should have, is that the Mawson study was funded by an anti-vaccine group, published in an anti-vaccine journal (run by the Children’s Health Defense that Bobby Kennedy founded), and written by two anti-vaccine experts whose previous work had been retracted by the peer-review journals they had published it in. Bobby Kennedy knew all this, but he still cited the study as legitimate. He lied.
Vaccines are bad enough, but Bobby Kennedy has probably been neutered on that issue and can’t go spraying his false vaccine views over public health policy. But he’s giving false hope to people who believe in his lies, convincing them like a Jim Jones in Jonestown to drink the Kool-Aid and it will solve all their problems. Over the past few days I’ve exchanged posts on Substack with the mother of two autistic teenage boys that make her and her husband feel trapped in torment for the rest of their lives. But Bobby Kennedy will, she is sure, solve their problems and bring peace to their lives. I don’t want to be rude, so I don’t ask this question so starkly, but in my mind I have to wonder, “Bobby Kennedy is going to help you? How?”
Sorry, but you are talking rubbish. First result of a search : Results have shown that 20 min RFR exposure of 900 and 1,800 MHz induces an effect and increases the permeability of BBB of male rats. There was no change in female rats.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19811403/
Yes, there are papers like that. Did you read it? What did you think of its methodology? Why do you think male rats were affected but not female rats? Since radio frequency radiation is non-ionizing, with only thermal effects, how do you think it could break down the blood-brain barrier? If the rats were only exposed to low power radio waves, similar to what all of us humans experience, why doesn’t the blood-brain barrier get broken down in all of our brains (or at least, in all male brains)?
I ask those questions to point out that the paper is pretty worthless. It does nothing to support Bobby Kennedy’s argument that radio frequency radiation breaks down the blood-brain barrier and causes cancer and other diseases.
If the pharma/HHS relationship is healthly how do you account for examples like Vioxx? This extract is from a blogging medical Dr – one of many examples of pharma hiding negative info from regulators, Dr’s and patients. “For example, I recently covered the story of Merck’s Vioxx, an unsafe and unneeded painkiller which was kept on the market until outside investigators proved it was causing heart attacks and strokes (estimated to have killed 120,000 people by the time Vioxx was withdrawn), something Merck was fully aware of from the start. Vioxx resulted in a wave of lawsuits which cost Merck billions of dollars but never resulted in criminal charges against any of the executives responsible for those deaths” (rather they got bonuses).https://open.substack.com/pub/amidwesterndoctor/p/just-how-far-will-the-fda-go-to-protect?selection=23ebfcab-21bf-4da9-9031-370748252461&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
Not a fan then?
Nope. I’m glad you realized that. I thought my criticisms might have been a little too subtle.
They were, hence the question
You answer in great detail but you have completely missed the point of the article. The idea is to challenge the status quo. Detailed histories and summaries, who said what and when …. are not really relevant.
This article points out that Bobby Kennedy is a brokenist. He points out the problems with health we have in this country. That’s what trial lawyers like him do — they talk and talk and talk.
But we don’t need to be told what is broken, we need know how to fix it. And there trial lawyers like Bobby Kennedy offer nothing. He doesn’t understand the science behind the health problems we have, or the problems governments have in fixing them. He has no experience fixing problems himself.
Say you have a problem with your car — it won’t start. Do you call someone who will come over and just tell you the problem with your car? No, you want someone who can fix it.
Surely, this is the whole point. Nobody is fixing the problems anyway. If anything, they are creating new problems.
“But we don’t need to know what is broken, we need to fix it”
Seriously!
Let’s see shall we. Today is Day 1
Sorry but you are talking complete nonsense as far as RFK Jr is concerned. He is far from being anti-science. Just to put my viewpoint in perspective, I’m not some know nothing person. I have both an MD and PhD, and have been elected to various elite scientific honour societies in both the US and UK, so you cannot exactly accuse me of being anti-science. That doesn’t mean that my views are necessarily correct of course and reasonable people can disagree but at least they don’t come with any anti-science bias.
When it comes to vaccines, the issue is not so cut and dried, it is far more nuanced than most people appreciate, and the problem is that so many, including yourself, automatically assume that because a particular product has “vaccine” in front of it, it is automatically safe and effective. That is absolutely not the case. Some vaccines are safe and effective, others are fairly safe but relatively ineffective, and then some are both unsafe and ineffective. Further a lot depends on the risk/benefit ratio for any given vaccine. Let me give you just a couple of examples. Take the Hep B vaccine. This is effective but like all products can have severe adverse reactions (no surprise). But why in the US is this given to 1 day old babies given that the route of transmission for Hep B is largely through IV drug use and unprotected sex. It would be one thing if the HepB vaccine lasted a lifetime when given to 1 day old babies but it doesn’t. It’s only good for about 10 years. Or take Gardasil, the vaccine against HPV that has been sold to the public by Merck as putting an end to all cervical cancer. First this isn’t true because gardasil only covers a limited number of strains of HPV. Second, there is actually no proof (because this requires really long term study) that gardasil even prevents cervical cancer. Third, cervical cancer is a rare consequence of a common infection (genital HPV infections are common and are usually easily fought off by the body’s immune system). Fourth, it is easy to screen for cervical cancer by yearly PAP smears. And lastly, one of the adverse events associated with gardsail is death, and I think you’ll agree that this is an irreversible adverse event that one cannot climb out of unless one happens to be the Messiah!!! And then lets go the mRNA Covid vaccines which are on the childhood US vaccination schedule for children 6 months and older. Well in the UK and US you can’t even get a covid booster if your under 65, except under special circumstances, and why one would give a covid shot to a child where the risk of bad effects from Covid are close to zero.
Also bear in mind that the childhood vaccine schedule in the US is many times more aggressive than in either the UK or the EU, so one really does have to question the US schedule.
Lastly on the subject of autism it is important to note that one cannot prove a null. Further the study that is quoted was conducted by somebody supported by Pharma (so conflict of interest) and the data were not analyzed properly. What one needs to do is look at the onset of autism in the period 4 weeks before vaccination and 4 weeks after. If there is no temporal difference, then the vaccine and autism are not linked, at least in the short term. But if the results are skewed to the 4 week after period, you have your answer. This has not been done. So just repeating the mantra that any link between vaccination and autism has been debunked is itself just bunk, and just because a falsehood is repeated again and again by the MSM does not make it the truth.
Ultimately one has to use common sense. Just as it is unreasonable in the US to have carcinogenic (or potentially carcinogenic) additives in one’s processed foods (such as cereals) especially when these substances have been banned in Canada and Europe, so it is unreasonable to mandate vaccination for those vaccines that don’t have any benefit to 3rd parties. believe it or not this doesn’t just include the mRNA vaccines which do not prevent infection or transmission but many others, including the inactivated polio virus vaccine (IPV) which prevents poliomyelitis but does not prevent infection or transmission in contrast to the oral attenuated polio virus vaccine (OPV) which does but was taken off the market in the us in 2000 because in rare instances the attenuated virus reverted to a more pathogenic form resulting in polio. In fact, all the polio cases in the US since 1976 have been entirely attributable to the attenuated vpolio virus and revertants and not a single case of wild type polio has been seen in the US since 1976. Now I’m not advocating that one shouldn’t get the IPV, but surely it’s up to the parents given that the IPV does not afford any benefit to 3rd parties (i.e. there is no herd immunity afforded by widespread administration of the IPV).
Here are some of Bobby Kennedy’s anti-science claims:
— vaccines cause autism and other diseases
— genetically modified foods are harmful
— Cellphone and wi-fi radiation breaks down the blood-brain barrier and causes cancer and other diseases
— Roundup causes cancer
— ultra-processed foods cause chronic diseases
— HIV is not the cause of AIDS
— high-fructose corn syrup is more harmful than table sugar
What is your problem?! Lots of these are now standard beliefs eg Roundup. Sure, that doesn’t mean they are so BUT there is significant evidence and most of the contrary research is ‘tainted’. Surprised you didn’t add ‘tobacco causing cancer’ to your list.
Carlos, Are you a Democrat? If so, then you’re not likely to agree with any of Trump’s picks or policies.
I have been a Republican for over 40 years but never a neocon or RINO. I assure you that what many of us want is a shake up. We are not worried about what this unorthodox government might do to us. We are thoroughly sick of what the orthodox ones have done for all these years.
No, I’m not a Democrat. I just prefer a Pam Bondi to a Matt Gaetz. A Marco Rubio to a Tulsi Gabbard. And (almost) anybody to Bobby Kennedy.
I like Bondi over Gaetz. Rubio and Gabbard sort of balance each other out.
Your vehemence regarding medically related topics makes me wonder whether you work in the field. Some of my experiences with physicians and reading “Medical Nemesis” and “Confessions of a Medical Heretic” when I was young have had an impact on me, I will admit.
See my contribution on this thread. You are being conned but if you blindly trust these Gene based mRNA vaccines then good luck. There is I feel an ulterior motive for these unproven (as we will soon see) technologies.
“Kennedy’s former positions on abortion and gun control, among other issues, might have been disqualifying”
But abortion and gun control are issues on which reasonable people can hold varying opinions. Poisoning your nation’s children with junk food and poorly researched pharmaceuticals are not.
It may be help hasten folks appreciation what a shambles they elected if more of the crazy Trump picks do in fact get a chance to have a go at the role he wants them to have. Painful short term probably but a necessary cathartic experience perhaps for the Voter?
And the Article refers to a coming contradiction probably much more political dynamite than vaccines – where I doubt RFK ends up doing much. A supporting Senator praised RFK for wanting to ensure that ‘all Americans have access to nutrient-dense whole foods, safe medicines and effective primary care along with addressing the soaring mental health crisis that our youth and young adults face’. Well who’d disagree with that…until you have to deliver it and it requires you make other political choices because many don’t have this now. But crack on, make the promise. The more the Court of Mar-a-Lago make and then break the quicker people recognise they’ve been proper Grifted.
And driving down medical costs? It’s v needed in the US. But do they have a plan? Nope. Well ok if you make people live healthier lives then potentially costs might stabilise but this isn’t a quick fix fellas. These two will be on Lecanmab well before they accomplish that. Oh hang on just clicked how they’ll reduce costs – remove the higher risk folks from cover altogether. And who cares so long as you keep sufficient happy to secure re-election.
What’s a bit less clear is whether fact RFK likely to v quickly suggest things Trump has no intention of funding, esp if heaven forbid it compromises the Billionaire tax cuts, something they are both too stupid to have appreciated will happen fairly quickly, or too egotistical to assume the other won’t change their position. Good grief do you think it could possibly be both?
In the last paragraph the point is made that, “Americans have turned to this disruptor alliance in hopes of a remedy to élite-led chaos.”
I take this to mean that they have, as do we, governing élites who are indistinguishable from each other. They go to the same universities, study for the same degrees, have the same ideas with a total lack of originality, say the same things, react simultaneously in the same way, use the party systems to further their own careers, etc, etc. The vote for Trump, and probably RFK, is to try to challenge this élite, to pose different questions, to make the politicians answer those questions, to actually think about the electorate, rather than their own ambitions. Things can only change by breaking the mould and then you toss a coin to decide whether the results are good or bad.
The principle is that anything is better than the status quo – and I certainly would agree with that. But the combination of having new ideas or just new questions has to be positive – otherwise we all just sink beneath filth and crime. Look at the problems in Birmingham, UK. All of our politicians are just ignoring the issue.
Like with Brexit many Voters have v genuine grievances which I concur with. Over an extended period things have just gotten more unequal, unfair and a v rich elite have disappeared over the horizon. They’ve just jumped on the wrong solution and the wrong agents for it. Trump et al are superb at using rage, amplifying that and gaining power as a result. But just watch how much they really do for the ‘little guy’ and ‘left behinds’. You know as well as I they are in it for themselves first and foremost.
There’s an adage that many folks tend to trust the person who tells them what they want to hear but in fact as we all instinctively know it’s the person who tells us what we don’t want to hear we should listen to most. Yet we are suckers for the former. We end up with Populists for the that reason.
and your solution is….?
Which problem Rock? Narrow it down a bit Shipmate because that’s pretty broad and then I’ll give you some thoughts.
It astonishes me that you were able to get through the Biden administration – probably the most disastrous American regime in history for both the US and the world – without finding anything at all to criticise, and yet are able to universally condemn everything that its successor proposes before anything at all has been done.
It’s depressing that you’re unable to recognise that the ‘we’re always good, they’re always bad’ mindset does more damage than anything Trump is likely to manage.
Plenty not so good in Biden regime.
You tend to be a little instinctive on the labelling of anyone who doesn’t agree with you HB. It’s a bit one trick pony if you don’t mind me saying. Sense it gives is your depth of knowledge on many issues isn’t that deep or wide so you fall back on a bit of playground stuff. That elite US education must have been paid for.
You invented the ‘elite US education’. I didn’t.
I don’t agree with most of Kennedy’s nonsense, but if you want a building destroyed, you can either take it apart slowly piece by piece and try to save the good parts, or you can just drop a bomb on it and start over. After COVID revealed the extent of the corruption in the bureaucracy and the extent to which it’s run by big pharma, I’m fine with the latter approach. Putting tinfoil hat Kennedy in the same room with bought and paid for shills like Fauci is like throwing two wolverines in a shed, an easy way to get rid of two wolverines.
Slightly OTT – but a quick question for any lawyers on this forum:
C19 cost my business hundreds of thousands in lost income. Now that it’s become clear that the cause was negligence and/or corruption in the US government can I sue? Even more germaine: can the twenty million or so families worldwide that lost loved ones demand compensation?
Surely you mean reparations?
That sounds like a distinction without a difference. Or were you being ironic?
You could make a reasonable argument that ‘as the USA, so the UK’.
Are the Labour Party and the Conservative Party full of “status quoists” – and the electorate increasingly becoming “brokenists”?
It looks increasingly as though they are. The question is whether Farage (the only realistic option to lead the brokenists to power) has the political weight to assemble a coalition of brokenists. And who would they be?
October 17th 2024
Using high powered scanning electron microscope technologies, a team of research scientists from Argentina affirmed the presence of “at least 55 undeclared chemical elements found in 6 brands of Covid 19 vaccines including toxic metals, radioactive elements and rare earth metals (Lanthanides).
Forgive me but weren’t Vaccines supposed to save lives? On a separate note the new mRNA vaccines both for Cancer and Covid have AI installed in them. Are we being used as research guinea pigs here or what? We need full disclosure here by the new administration.
Will someone please tell me what the Trudeau-coined word ‘brokenist’ means please? Perhaps I’m thick – but I don’t get it! Thank you in anticipation.
OK. Got it! Thanks!
“… brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country.”
[Newhouse, A. (2022). Brokenism. Tablet. Retrieved from: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/brokenism-alana-newhouse%5D