I was involved with the raw vegan community in liberal Santa Cruz California for a number of years, and this was a very common opinion there. In some presentations I felt like the local extremist for insisting that germ theory was a good thing that led to the advantages of modern medicine. I now travel more in conservative trending carnivore circles where I haven't heard germ theory denial. On the contrary they tend to take particular pleasure in referring to conventional studies, to counter accusations of their own extremism. From my own experience it seems that RFK has imported these views more from the left than the right. Do others have a different experience?
Does it matter where he got his viewpoint? He could have heard it on a bus going to Cucamonga for all we know. At this point, trying to trace back which side is at fault for RFK's incredibly absurd ideas is mute and irrelevant unless you're just looking to give some rational for why he came to those conclusions.
We need to educate people from an early age in media literacy, skepticism and science. Make The Demon-Haunted World a mandatory read for every high school student.
It matters because it is in the public interest that whatever cultural process affected him doesn't happen again, not even to the most despicable idiots, because this is the kind of "incredibly absurd ideas" that kills people. For the sake of defense in depth, how he got his place despite his opinions is a very important related question.
Personally, I'm afraid it could be a deliberate propaganda pose, with the dual objective of distracting the masses with an enemy and depriving people of expensive actual healthcare.
it's not like this is the first time that a bunch ofnew age folks with a predilection for alternative lifestyles and "health" practices have quickly moved from a hedonistic "liberal" position to a shockingly right-wing position.
A lot of the mysticism and weird ideas of cultural cleanliness that we can see exhibited in the ruling classes of Germany during the 1890s-1940s are very present in the ideas in the current MAHA movement.
That similarity might push against the idea that these ideas are purely propagandistic in nature. Personally, I might feel a little more reassured if I thought that RFKs positions were pure grift, but I have been watching a lot of my woo-woo friends flat-earth their way to fascism and find it somewhat chilling.
I'm reminded of the 'surfin bird' family guy episode where Peter is fishing for a prompt to sing surfin bird, and Brian in-good-faith bites, but Stewie yells at Brian for doing the bad thing.
It's like we've given up on the people with bad behavior to the point that we tacitly endorse them to have whatever terrible viewpoint they have, even while we admonish others like they're more responsible than the person with the bad behavior.
We have to stop giving bad-faith-actors the benefit of the doubt. RFK is a grifter. It definitely doesn't matter where he got the viewpoint from, he has 1 million terrible viewpoints that are not grounded in science. He's figured out how to pedal this as non-extremist and couch it in friendlier language, but that just makes him more of a snake.
Trying to ascribe it to "the left" or "the right" is trying to form a political weapon. The shape of the world is that we now have a clown car administration of utter retards, each pushing their own strain of feel-good harmful nonsense. The root cause of what has allowed these moronic ideas to take hold and grow ultimately comes down to affluenza and anti-intellectualism. The political leanings of the pockets where each of these strains were allowed to fester doesn't particularly matter, because the overriding commonality is that they make believers feel good and special for "knowing something others don't".
He’s just a conspiracy theorist that deeply mistrusts the output of scientific research. If it counters medical science, it must be true. Why? Because there is a grand conspiracy at play trying to smother the truth or some such paranoid nonsense. And in true conspiracy theorist fashion, he is one of the chosen that is going to reveal the truth.
Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.
And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
As for his other beliefs, like HIV not being the cause of AIDS, well that belief comes from renegade scientists in the 90s who alleged that a young Dr Fauci was at the center of a HIV-related conspiracy organized by virologists to give their field new relevance and grant funding, after attempts to connect viruses with the 60s era 'war on cancer' fell through. One of those scientists was himself a virologist, and another was Kary Mullis. Mullis is famous primarily for being the inventor of the PCR test, he even received a Nobel prize for it.
So where RFK Jr gets this stuff is no mystery.
Anyway the article is wrong. It quotes Paul Offit who makes the same claims in his Substack. I haven't read the book but people who have say Offit is selectively quoting Jr, who does believe germs exist; that he uses the terms miasma/terrain theory interchangeably, and that his book argues for a better balance between the notion of strengthening immune systems and targeted pathogen treatments - not that the latter shouldn't exist at all.
> Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.
> And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
> Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.
> The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
> Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.
> Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.
Speaking as someone who grew up in the United States Waldorf community, I would say that the type of community you and I have experience with isn't tightly aligned with the right/left political spectrum. The political environment of the 60s and 70s was such that earthy-crunchy devotees found lots of commonality on the left; as such I'd agree with your statement. But ideologically, there's no reason at all why people focused on returning older ways -- for reasons of health or otherwise -- wouldn't align with a movement that rejects modernity.
I recommend Leah Sotille's new book Blazing Eye Sees All, which looks at New Age figures who have drifted into the MAGA movement. It's kind of wild seeing the channelers I remember from my childhood going hard right.
It's not the "liberal" mindset, it's the mindset of being open to conspiracy theories like Pizzagate or QAnon and circulates in similar circles. The number of suburban moms that fell for all that does not fit your hypotheses. It made the news cycle for a while: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/qanon-conspiracies-moms-life...
How often do left-wing people with health-related conspiracy theories get into government positions (by election or appointment, at all levels) compared to right-wing people with health-related conspiracy theories, is what I'd like to know. Even in the case that RFK Jr. received his conspiracy theories more from the left, I get the impression that RFK meshes more with right-wing political figures, even though you could make the case that he doesn't try to appeal to the right-wing population.
And free trade agreements was the cornerstone of right wing - while the left derided it as a way to offshore jobs. Now Trump is running with it.
At this point it doesn't matter which "side" it came from. Even if it came from the "left", people knew this was pseudoscience and relied on anecdotal evidence and it never went mainstream. You never had a HHS Secretary espousing the goodness of unchecked pseudoscience in the name of "challenging the status quo".
