QOTD -- The Insidious MAHA Project

 

"... At the core of RFK’s engagement with public health has been his decades-long crusade against vaccinations. During the pandemic, he declared the Covid vaccine the 'deadliest vaccine ever made.' Upon becoming HHS secretary, he immediately fired all the members of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with people more in line with his dangerous quackery. If Kennedy Jr. has a defining belief, it is his claim that 'autism is caused by vaccines.' All the scientific evidence in the world (and in this case: the complete lack of evidence, despite a mountain of studies) will not shake him. Under his leadership, U.S. public health authorities are no longer allowed to state the undisputed scientific truth that vaccines *do not* cause autism; he has been working hard to channel massive public resources into finding / manufacturing 'evidence' for his conspiratorial nonsense.  [snip]

" ... Let us insist on approaching MAHA as what it really is: A form of rightwing extremism that fulfills a specific role in the larger far-right ecosystem and a political project driven by paranoid conspiracism. That story – how MAHA relates to MAGA, how it channels ambiguous anxieties and ties them to a genuinely extremist rightwing cause, how to situate it in the history of the Far Right and how it captures the defining sensibilities of today’s extremists, how its rise, just like that of Trumpism more generally, is itself the manifestation of severe pathologies of American political culture – is the one we need to investigate, the one worth telling. And that is the story that should make it abundantly clear why we must fight tooth and nail against any normalization of this insidious project and the people behind it." --  historian Thomas Zimmer, writing in his "Democracy Americana" Substack, on "The Assault on Public Health and the Self-Sabotage of a Nation."  Zimmer discusses the grievance-channeling by right-wing extremists engaging in anti-science conspiracy theories and quackery that has become the hallmark of the Malignant Fascist and Bobby Brainworm's public health policy-making.   It's indeed an assault and self-sabotage being carried out by the same extremists carrying out assaults and self-sabotage in every other phase of American life and governance in the MF's reign of error.