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BERLIN — When you listen to that infamous three-hour podcast in which conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan interviews conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you’ll want to pause about every 20 seconds. Because at roughly that frequency, Kennedy utters untruths, debunks proven theories, distorts facts, and repeatedly appears to simply make things up: about vaccines whose side effects are supposedly being concealed; about Wi-Fi that supposedly causes cancer; about pesticides that are supposed to make people trans.
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Today, a year-and-a-half after the podcast was released, RFK Jr. is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the U.S. in decades, he only very timidly calls for vaccination, even though vaccination is the only treatment that truly helps. Instead, he praises treatments that don’t work, such as antibiotics, even though measles is a virus.
Kennedy loves raw milk and wants to “give infectious diseases a break,” despite the measles outbreak and even though avian flu is now circulating in thousands of cattle herds in the U.S. He is currently destroying the U.S. biomedical infrastructure, which the whole world has long envied, and wants to re-investigate the long-since thoroughly disproven link between vaccinations and autism. Probably by an anti-vaxxer.
Is this all just crazy talk? Yes, on the one hand. On the other hand, anyone who dismisses Kennedy as a mere crackpot who simply spouts erratic nonsense is missing the opportunity to ask important questions. They are overlooking the patterns that clearly lie behind his crude statements and decisions.
Of course, there’s a reason why Kennedy is so relatable to the far right today, even coming from someone who spent more than half his life as a Democrat and advocated for many left-wing positions, including calling for higher taxes for the rich and fighting against corporations as an environmental advocate. Kennedy’s worldview, his beliefs, and his view of humanity are clearly rooted in certain ideas. Two of them date back far into history and have the potential to cause great harm. But one of them has at least a kernel of truth.
One of the most dangerous ideas of the 19th century
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a press conference on April 16, the topic was autism. Kennedy, wearing a blue pinstriped suit and a thin tie, walked to the podium, put on reading glasses, and read out some numbers. One in 31 children aged eight has autism, Kennedy declared, which was “shocking” — and in this case, true.
But then came a characterization of the lives of autistic people that revealed more about Kennedy himself than about the autistic people: “These are children who will never pay taxes, they will never hold a job, they will never play baseball or write a poem, they will never go on a date. Many of them will never go to the bathroom unaided.”
It’s a drastic description and one that doesn’t reflect reality. People on the autism spectrum are affected to varying degrees. Many of them work, most could certainly play baseball, and virtually all go to the bathroom alone. The Netflix series “Love on the Spectrum” revolves around the love lives of people with autism.
It’s about taking away social support or access to medical care from the weak, and leaving them to fend for themselves.
What Kennedy described applies, if at all, only to severe cases of autism something he later acknowledged. However, the U.S. Autism Society writes that Kennedy uses buzzwords like “epidemic” and “chronic illness,” which are based on outdated medical models “that dehumanize autistic individuals, perpetuate stigma and stereotypes, and undermine decades of progress in disability rights.”
Volker Roelcke, Professor of Medical History at the University of Giessen, goes a step further. “This is social Darwinism,” he says. Statements like “You will never pay taxes” reveal what Roelcke calls “a dog-whistle rhetoric that is typically social Darwinist.”
Emerging at the end of the 19th century, Social Darwinism postulates that in every society there is a struggle for survival in which only the fittest prevail. In the arrogance of biologism, it applies the laws of Darwin’s theory of evolution to human society, transforming it into a normative theory.
Only the weak die
“A very central concept of social Darwinism,” says Roelcke, “is that of contraselection.” This refers to the idea that social measures and medical care in a society override natural selection. And according to social Darwinists, this is a highly problematic behavior in modern societies because it leads to so-called degeneration.
Roelcke was recently in the U.S. and spoke with numerous physicians and scientists. “Many are deeply concerned about the most vulnerable in society.”
Indeed, Kennedy has long since made decisions that make these concerns seem justified: For example, he has cut funding in various areas to precisely those people who are most in need of support. An analysis by the journal JAMA, for example, shows that the cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are hitting minority health and health inequalities the hardest the area that addresses how to help poorer people, who on average die many years earlier than the rich, achieve better health.
Additionally, Kennedy’s cuts are severely impacting local health departments that help poor and disadvantaged people by educating them about healthy eating, offering free health screenings, or helping smokers quit. But the greatest impact on the health of the most vulnerable could be the planned cuts to the Medicaid program, which provides health insurance for 85 million poor and working class Americans.
“Social Darwinism,” says medical historian Roelcke, “is about taking away social support or access to medical care from the weak, that is, the sick or vulnerable, and leaving them to fend for themselves.” The fact that they then died earlier was not only of no concern to the Social Darwinists, but even desired.
Kennedy’s handling of the largest measles outbreak the U.S. has experienced in decades clearly shows echoes of social Darwinism. Namely, when he falsely claimed that no healthy children were dying from measles and that poor nutrition played a role in the deaths. RFK Jr. is saying between the lines that it’s not the healthy, the fit, and the strong who are dying, but only the weak.
Nazi genes
Historically, the National Socialists took Social Darwinism to extremes. In textbooks and on posters, Nazi ideologists repeatedly emphasized the burden the “national community” had to bear in supporting “hereditarily ill” people. One illustration, for example, shows a broad-shouldered man, head bowed, carrying a yoke with dark figures sitting on either end. Above it is the caption: “Here, you help carry the burden. A person with hereditary disease costs an average of 50,000 Reichsmarks by the time they reach the age of 60.” In math class, there were exercises in which students were asked to calculate how many apartments could be built with the money that an “insane asylum” costs.
During the Nazi era, Social Darwinism culminated in so-called racial hygiene, also known as eugenics. Its goal was to “improve” the country’s gene pool and “keep the race pure.” The measures the Nazis employed are well known today: The reproduction of supposedly “genetically healthy” individuals was encouraged. At the same time, those with “hereditary diseases,” alcoholics, and those branded as “antisocial,” such as those unwilling to work and beggars, were forcibly sterilized or confined to barracks to prevent them from reproducing.
What may be far less well known is that while Nazi Germany, with its medical crimes, was the most blatant example of eugenic policy, the United States had long been a global pioneer of the eugenic movement. By 1930, eugenically motivated laws for forced sterilization existed in over 25 states, and approximately 60,000 Americans fell victim to the procedure even after the end of World War II. Women, especially Black women, were particularly hard hit.
It’s precisely this desire for homogeneity that makes him an ideal health minister for the xenophobic Trump administration
Medical historian Volker Roelcke, however, cautions not to take this point too far: “I don’t see any eugenic thinking at work in Kennedy’s case at the moment, because no measures seem to be planned that would specifically interfere with human reproduction.”
It’s still important to demonstrate where social Darwinism can lead, especially because such rhetoric has regained momentum in public discourse during the coronavirus pandemic: It was repeatedly said that “only” the very elderly and chronically ill were dying in large numbers from COVID-19, so why all the protective measures? Kennedy also writes in his book that only six percent of COVID deaths were among “completely healthy people.” For those who weren’t aware of this before, the pandemic showed how compatible the naive belief in nature as a moral authority is with right-wing ideas of social hierarchy.
But Kennedy’s rise to be the right’s secret champion also has to do with his apparent unwillingness to tolerate anything that deviates. It’s precisely this desire for homogeneity that makes him an ideal health minister for the xenophobic Trump administration, whose core promise is the restoration of a homogenously white America (which, admittedly, never existed).
Simple solutions
This is evident, for example, in Kennedy’s treatment of transgender people, i.e., people who do not identify with their biological sex. A new report from his ministry advocates treating such individuals with “exploratory psychotherapy.” Trans activists suspect this is similar to conversion therapy, which doctors have long used to “cure” homosexuals a practice that, of course, has failed because sexual identity is not a mental illness.
In any case, Kennedy doesn’t seem to be concerned about the mental well-being of trans people. The planned cuts to his agency are reportedly also expected to affect a suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ people, which has had around 1.2 million calls since 2022 and is intended to prevent desperate individuals from taking their own lives.
Kennedy’s desire to “solve” issues like autism, transgender identity, and intersexuality is not only naive and dangerous. It also leads him to embrace completely false theories that have one thing in common: They promise a simple solution. Vaccines cause autism, environmental toxins make young people trans. Yes, taking action against hormone-like substances in drinking water is a good idea. But they, of course, are not the reason why some people don’t identify with their biological sex.
But that’s precisely what appeals to the hypermasculine New Right, a whole world of influencers (so-called “manosphere”) who are becoming increasingly influential. Their goal: to use a fitness and nutrition cult to create stereotypical, physically strong men and thereby create a strong nation. And what harms these men, according to the right-wing influencers, are chemicals from agriculture and food, such as estrogen from soy products and medications. These come from “globalists” who want to replace white men with migrants.
Take your vitamins
A health minister committed to fighting chronic diseases, who wants to do something to help people age well, eat healthier, and exercise more. All of this would be a huge win for the United States. In an ideal world, one might hope that Kennedy, who spent half his life fighting legal battles against industrial giants, is just the right person for this.
But so far, he hasn’t done anything about it. The only time he’s challenged food companies, says Paul Offit, was over artificial colorings, which are supposed to be removed from food and replaced with natural ones. “But so far, that’s been voluntary for the companies. I doubt it will improve health in our country.”
A closer look even reveals that much of what Kennedy has done so far is likely to achieve the opposite of his intended goal.
We hear mostly quack formulas
The massive funding cuts at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, have wiped out almost the entire department that deals with public health and develops programs to combat chronic diseases.
Hardly any public health expert believes RFK Jr. is interested in a holistic shift towards a health policy that finally addresses chronic diseases. Instead, one hears mostly quack formulas: For those who want to strengthen their immune system, he simply recommends vitamins A and D.
Offit concludes that Kennedy “has fixed, unchangeable convictions, and he clings to them like a religious belief.” No new scientific finding will change his mind about anything health-related, whether it’s vaccinations or nutrition. A science denier is always a science denier.
