My First and Last Statement on RFK Jr.
And why debating vaccine efficacy is fucking stupid.
I consider myself a progressive and I was a two-time Bernie supporter, but once I catch a whiff of the anti-science shit, I know this isn’t my crowd. RFK Jr. is for the most unpleasant and aggrieved individuals of “the left” who think they are sticking it to the establishment by buying homeopathic supplements and then zone out the minute the discussion turns to policy. He is for the insufferable Tulsi Gabbard stans who refuse to learn their lesson. It is possible to distrust the establishment without completely surrendering all sense of intellect and common sense to mindless, reflexive contrarianism.
In short:
The medical establishment (Big Pharma, oil- and tobacco-funded scientists, for-profit healthcare, etc.) aren’t perfect at treating illnesses, and their profit motives warrant a degree of skepticism.
The studies that have thoroughly disproved the notion that vaccines cause autism have been administered by non-profit groups, universities, and government health agencies that mostly operate outside of market incentives, which makes them generally trustworthy.
It would take purposeful ignorance to misunderstand the vast difference between academic experts and corporate grifters.
The currently proposed vaccination methods are effective in mitigating the worst effects of Covid, especially in contrast to the psychos imploring people to ingest Ivermectin or pool cleaner or even drink their own urine.
If you have ever spoken to an anti-vaxxer, you have likely encountered a specific kind of goofy rhetorical flourish posing as a devastating and unassailable conclusion. If you have ever asked an anti-vaxxer to go beyond their boilerplate counterarguments and say what they think this is all really about, or what COVID vaccination protocols might be about beyond minimizing the spread of an airborne virus, they’ll spew out vague platitudes like “money” and “control” that are, again, not quite as undeniably conclusive as they conceive these answers to be. For all their convoluted and cosmetic suspicions and the opacity of their oafish paranoia, this all resolves itself into millions of Americans demanding everyone else to engage in a public deliberation over the molecular makeup of vaccines.
There isn’t any logical retort to override their lazy suspicion that it is unfair and unconstitutional and somehow tantamount to the Literal Holocaust that any element of their all-important personal convenience might be contingent upon or even related to anyone else’s. There isn’t an even-keeled response to their fear that their holy ease will be threatened by some other greater responsibility. These people will never be convinced that this is Still About A Virus, because they never once believed that anything is ever more pressing than their own sour selves and a jealous world’s conspiracy against their own comfort. This grandiose vanity is the only consistent throughline stitching together such a disordered outlook on life. All of this would indicate that the entire edifice of authority is collapsing.
If this is the case, the basic processes that are supposed to create publicly agreed-upon understandings of scientific phenomena and medical policies have become totally untrustworthy for a segment of the population that is more invested in defending their off-the-rack political identity and their attendant relentlessly assertive collection of signifiers. There are, as it turns out, tens of millions of Americans whose single most deeply held value is to continue to hold on to their curdled memetic grievances forever. For these people, having to do something other than whatever it is they want to do, at any moment and for any reason, is a sign of being owned, which really is a much more urgent threat than a plague or sickness or even death. For them, to be without the agency to make the same stupid non-choices, every day, is not fundamentally different than being killed, because making these facile politics-as-consumerist choices is what it means to be alive and free.
These ugly individuated choices are what we get. So now these anti-vaxxers demand we engage in public politicized discussions about a topic that regular people do not fully comprehend. Without any technical expertise, it is the layman’s reality that we are just assuming these studies are correct—and for most people, this is enough to convince them to get the vaccine. I have received the shot five times, as it was a matter of basic risk assessment: Faced with the choice between Joe Rogan and experts who have studied medicine for 10 years, the Alpha Brain guy loses. I will not apologize to YouTube/Reddit logic pedants for this appeal to authority.
In response to anti-vaxxers urging each of us to “do your research,” I have formulated a “no homework” policy as a direct refutation. We all have access to the same peer-reviewed studies and they will still go for the easy answer they saw on Facebook and will still arrive at these aggressively stupid conclusions. It’s pointless to argue about vaccine efficacy with these people if every party involved lacks any formal education on these subjects.
These debates, if anything, render any mutual agreement on the truth an impossibility because they aren’t even addressing the fundamental collapse of our institutions, the foundational cracks like the general mistrust of medicine because Big Pharma has become a giant money-making operation that leaves millions of Americans broken and sick. Our inability to form a coherent criticism of private health insurance or pharmaceutical monopolies—let alone debate the policy merits of Medicare-for-All—has created a demented realm of public debate, one that is politically useless because the weeds of vaccine contents are inaccessible to regular people.
It is also equally entertaining to watch all the consternation and hysteria among Biden Democrats about how RFK Jr. is a danger to democracy. The electoral prospects of a 1,000-year-old man that we were told is the most electable candidate to beat Trump and restore the soul of America are now threatened by a triangulating crank who sounds like Steve-o with throat cancer.
This hysteria is a suppressed horror borne out of balancing two untenable positions:
The Democratic Party is the last line of defense against complete destruction of all democratic institutions and the rise of fascism.
Yet, the Democratic Party is incapable of stopping a senile mummy with a 40% approval rating from risking an election they can’t lose.
Denizens of the blue bubble have invested their entire belief in America’s future in the perceived capability of the Democratic Party, which is fundamentally a non-functional apparatchik terminally crippled by its own symbiotic corruption and incompetence. Instead of supporting labor unions or progressive movements, these rabid Vote Blue No Matter Who types will scream at anyone who reminds them of the Democrat’s institutional dysfunction.
I don’t care to spend my time acting as the voting police, but if you insist on casting a protest vote, at least consider doing so for Cornell West instead of RFK Jr. At least Brother West never turned his back on Roger Waters.
Related Read
If you enjoyed this, here’s a series I wrote on how America’s pandemic response is a case study of the tension between empathy and misanthropy:
The "no homework" policy is an amazingly liberating one. I highly recommend it. There's really no pint to engaging with the dO yOuR rEsEArCh crowd; you can litigate every point they make; they'll just move to another one. Playing talking point whack-a-mole is not the best use of one's time.
As for Biden & the Dems. Can we PLEASE get someone that's from Gen X AND a dynamic candidate? in my state, until recently, the left had a bad habit of have milquetoast candidates face off against the GOP. The result is a gerrymandered state at war with itself.
Everything under the sun keeps getting renamed, rebranded, repositioned, yet the tribe of ignorance continues to be given the dignity of being called anti-vax. They're pro-disease. That's the only accurate label.