Do You Now Trust "The Science"?
MAGA/MAHA has not surmounted the credibility issue
You can read about today’s press conference and catch the videos, elsewhere. There is no need for me to amplify any fanfare for the work of politicians.
I did not trust the authorities during Covid. I do not trust them now. Medicine is still extremely politicized. Having Trump do the speaking, then RFK Jr. (not a scientist, not a doctor), only makes matters worse. I took what they said, at most, as a mere suggestion, a correlation, a possibility. The event was primarily a political event—right down to the now standard MAGA elegizing of the romantic primitiveness of their Aryan noble savages, the glorious Amish. (This included the repetition of absolute falsehoods about the purported health and wellbeing of the Amish.)
If they want us to “trust the science,” then we should ask for science that is not funded by industry, and science that is not a tool of partisan political activists. “Regulatory capture” comes by both routes.
At the very least, choose credible spokespersons.
Patting yourselves on the back for being skeptics during Covid, yet turning around and cheering today—means you have been played. You are the tool of a partisan movement, that sought you out in order to (re)align you with MAGA. The success of MAGA activists was in seeking out the seemingly impossible, people living in a paradox: they are both critical, yet gullible. The key was to steer their criticism down a narrow political channel, and open their minds to suggestion from other political interests. (Let us not overlook how the Brownstone Institute under Jeffery Tucker, was funded by Charles Koch, and how other Koch-related right-wing donors funded the anti-lockdown movement.)
Seeing the blue RFK Jr. at the podium, with his history of heroin abuse and his neo-medieval apothecarial use of bizarre little purple tinctures, inspired in me exactly zero confidence in “the science, i.e., “The MAHA science”. Being told by his activist supporters that I should go look at “the data” at Children’s Health Defense, inspired even less: why is the government not publishing that data? Why do I need to seek out a private NGO that was actively fund-raising from RFK Jr.’s press conference? Standards have fallen to such a low point, that now anything goes: “the science” is owned by whomever wields the club.
We will have to wait longer not just for information that is sound and reliable, but also for people who possess both rationality and reasonability in order to process that information. We are a long way off from meeting these conditions.
All told, today’s feature was a non-event.