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Brad critiques the notion of finding common ground with RFK Jr. regarding public health and vaccines. He discusses RFK Jr.'s controversial views and their potential negative impact on American public health. Onishi examines past and present complexities surrounding U.S. public health policies and explores the Trump administration's influence, drawing connections to historical regulatory frameworks established by FDR. The episode also critiques modern figures promoting a return to pre-20th-century governance, linking their ideas to burgeoning autocratic tendencies.
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy You have gained notoriety for your skepticism about vaccines.
And over the summer in an interview you said, quote, there's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.
Do you still believe that?
I never said that.
So stop me.
We have the clip.
Please play the clip.
There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.
So you did say it.
Should we find common ground with RFK? That's what Dr. Bedard, a physician and somebody who researches public health, writes in a recent op-ed in the New York Times.
That finding common ground with RFK is the way to mitigate his views on vaccines and his approach to public health.
One of the things that I want to talk about today is how RFK fits into the entire scheme of the Trump cabinet.
And the ways that the men, and they're mostly men, who are set to lead the country as part of Trump's administration, all in some way want to repeal the 20th century.
That they want to break down a machine that they think was built in a different time and is holding them and the country back from flourishing.
Is that true?
And what will happen if they succeed?
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus podcast.
Brad Onishi here.
Good to be with you on this Monday.
And today we're talking about RFK Jr. and what effect he might have on the federal government, on the American public square.
And we're doing so from the launching point of an op-ed by...
Rachel Bedard, who's a physician and somebody who writes about medicine and criminal justice, Dr. Bedard published an op-ed in the New York Times back in November, and just recently there was an interview with Dr. Bedard in The Atlantic titled The Case for Finding Common Ground with RFK, and this was published on New Year's Eve.
There's certainly reason to be fearful.
of RFK being somebody who's in charge of health and human services in the United States.
He has risen to prominence as an anti-vaxxer, somebody who has called into question the effectiveness and the use of vaccines.
He has talked about taking fluoride out of the water.
He is somebody who has argued for the use of raw milk and raw dairy and so on as part of a healthy diet.
Now, the case that Dr. Bedard makes here in the op-ed is that, look, there is a way to find common ground with RFK because he has some seeds of truth in his positions on all of these things.
Dr. Bedard writes, In the spirit of wanting the best for the country, I believe there's a health care agenda that finds common ground between people like myself, medical research and clinicians, and Mr. Kennedy.
There are seeds of truth to some of what Mr. Kennedy says.
We can't spend four years simply fighting his agenda.
Non-cooperation won't protect the integrity of American public health or advance its interests.
Now, I don't see how that's true, and there's no defense of that in the piece.
It's just stated.
We can't spend four years simply fighting his agenda.
Well, if his agenda is not based on science and will hurt people, will have a truly terrible effect on American public health and individual health, then we can spend four years simply fighting his agenda.
And non-cooperation might be the best way to protect the integrity of American public health by continuing to remind people that there is somebody in charge who is articulating a public health policy that is based not on science, but on conspiracy theory.
Now, nonetheless, Dr. Bedard says, one place to start, Americans concerned about management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr. Kennedy's rise to power was fueled by the anxieties of anti-vaxxers, and though the pandemic was rarely discussed during the election, its aftermath loomed large and may have contributed to Democrats' defeat.
There has been no meaningful public reckoning from the federal government on the successes and failures of the nation's pandemic response.
Now, Dr. Better goes on to mention the ways that school closings, mass requirements, limits on gatherings, travel bans, had variable successes and failures.
The problem I have with this whole point is that RFK has now allied himself with the man who was in charge during that pandemic.
He quit his own presidential campaign, RFK did, in order to endorse Donald Trump, and that got him the promise, it seems, to be head of Health and Human Services.
So if we're going to talk about a reckoning with the federal government, and we're going to talk about a reckoning with the government's handling of the pandemic, we have to go right to the top.
The man who was in charge.
The man who was on TV saying that we should blast light into our bodies in order to scatter the virus or maybe use bleach.
The man who was in charge when we lost 40% more people than Canada and France and other developed nations.
The man who oversaw the deaths of a million Americans.
That man is the one who is now going to be president again.
So it is one thing to talk about measures, school closings, mass requirements, limits on gatherings, travel bans, etc.
You can also talk about vaccines, the ways that vaccines helped to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
But RFK is a notorious vaccine denier.
He has said, yes, I won't take anyone's vaccines away, but he's also cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of any vaccines.
He's not sure that any of them are healthy.
He's not sure that any of them How can we have a meaningful public reckoning with someone like that?
How can you expect the man who oversaw the worst pandemic response in the developed world and his underling, the man who thinks vaccines are poison, to lead or engage in a reckoning on the successes and failures of the nation's pandemic response?
A recent NPR article put it this way.
Kennedy endorsed debunked theories blaming vaccines for autism and some chronic diseases.
He accused the CDC of covering up evidence that, despite dozens of reputable scientific studies to the contrary, showed that vaccines are hurtful or deadly.
How can you have a meaningful reckoning with COVID, including the COVID vaccine, including the reluctance of many people to take it, including the ivermectin movement and so on, with a man who thinks the government and the CDC are covering up the fact that vaccines are to blame rather with a man who thinks the government and the CDC are covering up Now, I get it.
I have little children.
I know this is more complicated than pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine.
I know there's things to discuss.
But the problem I have with Dr. Bedard and this approach is that RFK does not want to do that.
He has not shown any willingness to listen and find common ground or complexity in these issues.
He's simply a contrarian.
Somebody who's shown up on the public scene to say, I have the answer to what's ailing everybody, and it's this.
And when you ask me for proof, I'm going to say, well, despite the studies that show that, I think the government's hiding this or there's a conspiracy over here, the CDC is covering this up.
Dr. Bedard continues, the lack of effort to build consensus about what the country did well and what to avoid next time is a missed opportunity to bring closure to a difficult era while preparing for the next pandemic.
A couple of things here.
Thank you.
How are we going to build consensus when one group is largely trying, trying, and I emphasize trying, to rely on data and evidence coming from the scientific community?
And where RFK is largely And the people who follow him largely relying on conspiracy theory and cover-ups, relying on debunked theories, and relying on habits and practices that most of the scientific community and health officials consider dangerous, giving kids raw milk, etc.
Dr. Bedard says, Restoring people's willingness to take vaccines is urgent, and Mr. Kennedy's skepticism on this topic may counterintuitively be an advantage.
His statements on vaccinations are more complex than they're often caricatured to be.
He said he was not categorically opposed to them or, as an official in the new Trump administration, planning to pull them from the market.
But he consistently raises largely unsupported safety concerns and positions, vaccine refusal as a matter of personal freedom.
Now, the issue here, of course, is that with vaccines, it requires a buy-in such that everybody is vaccinated and leading to...
A sense that we have public safety from things like measles and polio.
It is a fantasy to think we can lower vaccination rates and herd immunity in the U.S. and not suffer recurrence of these diseases, says Gregory Poland, co-director of the Atria Academy of Science and Medicine.
One in 3,000 kids who gets measles is going to die.
There's no treatment for it.
They're going to die.
I don't really understand the point here is that how can his vaccine skepticism help people to be willing to get vaccines or prepare us for the next pandemic?
One of the things that's so important in a position like the head of health and human services and so on is you have to be somebody who projects to the country a kind of plan, strategy, and sense of what is safe and what is not.
There have to be a sense of what can we trust when it comes to information.
I think all of us remember that back in the pandemic.
If you have someone like him in charge, who, as Dr. Bedard admits, often relies on unsupported safety concerns and positions, how can that person instill the kind of confidence in the public at large in order for us to enjoy community public health?
One more paragraph here.
And then I'm going to move on to a larger point.
Dr. Better talks about the ways that Kennedy has promised to expose the relationship between the medical establishment and corporate interests and the ways that they distort what's going on with scientific research and the effects on American health.
He argues, Better says, that the country under-invests in interventions that prevent chronic disease in favor of over-treating patients with drugs once they've fallen ill.
This critique has significant merit and is not especially controversial among healthcare providers.
Great!
So we under-invest in interventions that prevent chronic disease.
Okay.
That's fine.
But the ways that he wants to go about investing in preventative care or preventative measures to chronic diseases, again, relies on unsupported ideas and conspiracy theories.
So it's one thing for us to both agree that we're walking around and breathing air, or that fish swim in water, or that water is wet.
I guess that's common ground, if you want.
But if we immediately go to unhinged, unsupported conspiracy theories about what all that means, then what does that common ground even mean?
What I'm getting at here is this is not somebody interested in a kind of nuanced conversation about how to strategically approach Mr. Kennedy vowed to take on these questions by firing health agency leaders and personnel withholding funds and dismantling current regulatory practices.
There are better ways to achieve this, Dr. Bedard says.
He can, as he's promised, divert research and policy efforts towards disease prevention, diet, and exercise.
He can apply more rigor and skepticism to the drug approval process.
What about him makes you think he's going to do that?
Rigor is one thing.
Skepticism, okay.
Conspiracy, unsupported claims, wild ideas.
Those are another.
Mr. Kennedy often speaks about chronic disease as a problem caused by the government in cahoots with industry for corporate gain.
For me, this oversimplifies and over-politicizes the roots of disease.
But he's right that the public is owed more transparency about how scientific knowledge is produced.
So, like, we start with this idea that chronic disease is a conspiracy caused by the government in the hoots with industry for corporate gain.
Now, we've all thought about this as Americans.
We've all thought about the ways that the insurance industrial complex is problematic to the point of allowing people to die in this country.
Yes.
Okay.
The takeaway for me, though, when he says that the government is in cahoots with industry, taken in the context of his whole approach and worldview to public health, is not that the public is owed more transparency about how scientific knowledge is produced.
It's that we need a system that A, is scientific and follows evidence and data, but B, is one that doesn't rely on capital and profit.
Like every other developed nation in the world, from Costa Rica to Canada to Sweden and on down the line.
Like, to me, this whole idea of finding common ground with somebody who thinks that, yes, gravity exists, but that probably means that there's a magnet at the center of the Earth drawing us toward an alien ship that has burrowed into the middle of our planet.
It's really hard to say, well, yeah, we both agree there's gravity, and I wish people would be a little more aware of that.
That's just not where I'm at.
Where I'm at is his policies are going to lead to casualties, to people not getting vaccinated, to conspiracy theory.
And if we have another pandemic not knowing who we can trust, not knowing what information is valid, having to look to doctors in Canada or health officials in Germany in order to figure out what's going on, that's where we're going to be left.
Dr. Bedard, in one of the final paragraphs says, adopting a spirit of resistance against all practices and policies of the incoming administration, or dismissing a man with a growing movement behind him, won't help those working in medicine and public health advance the causes they care about.
It actually might.
I don't know.
And I'm not a public health official, so just take that with a grain of salt.
But adopting a spirit of resistance means resisting those who show up, claiming to want to help people be healthy, and relying on, as you admit in this op-ed, unsupported claims.
Things with no scientific evidence.
Dismissing a man with a growing movement behind him.
Thank you.
It's not about dismissing a man as much as it's saying, I'm dismissing the idea that you should be in charge and play the role of public health official in the United States.
A country of 400 million people.
This doesn't mean accepting or normalizing conspiracy theories.
Okay, well, it's pretty normalizing if he's going to be the head of health and human services and we're going to just sort of accept that unsupported wild claims are part of how our government runs its public health program.
It is a matter of engaging in the places where the critics have a point and trying to find ways to practice science without partisan interference.
How can you practice science if the person in charge...
Thinks that science itself is often a conspiracy theory or untrustworthy.
Engaging in the places where the critics have a point is one thing, but where the critics have a point is it's like opening up a hole.
It's digging a pit in the sand and finding something only to have someone come along right away and cover it over with a pile of dog shit because they think they have the answer.
To what's in that hole.
It's one thing for us to be skeptical and to apply rigor.
And believe me, I am so, so tired of the American health system.
This is not a defense of how we do public health or health at all in this country.
This is saying, if we're going to ever get a better system, there has to be trust.
There has to be a collective willingness to follow science and data and evidence.
And engaging with somebody Who at the very base sees the issues like so many do here and abroad in the American health system and saying, well, he's got a point.
We got some problems.
And it's like, yeah, we all see that.
But he's going to do things to address those problems that are so ridiculous, so unhinged, that it's going to put us backward.
It's going to set us to a place where getting something like government health care, single payer.
Medicare for All won't even be part of the discussion.
Because we're going to be talking about the fact that you might want to repeal the polio vaccine, or tell people that the measles vaccine is the thing causing them to die, or encouraging your kids to drink raw, unpasteurized milk, or taking the fluoride out of all the water in the United States.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
In the NPR article I mentioned, it says this, Kennedy's nomination validates and enshrines public mistrust of government health programs, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
The notion that he even be considered for that position makes people think he knows what he's talking about.
He appeals to lessened trust, the idea that there are things you don't see, data they don't present, and I'm going to find out so you can really make an informed decision.
Thank you.
And I guess...
The thing that is inevitable if he becomes the leader of health and human services is normalization.
This is the normalizing of non-scientific approaches to scientific health.
This is the normalizing of unsupported claims as the basis for figuring out what to do when it comes to a healthy body politic or a healthy human body.
Now, I want to zoom out and I want to try to provide some insight on what I think is a kind of pattern across the Trump cabinet picks, but also an attitude across MAGA Nation.
You You see this in Elon Musk.
You see this in J.D. Vance.
You see this in the post-liberal philosophers that inspire J.D. Vance, people like Patrick Deneen and the law professor Adrian Vermeule.
You see this in the tech industry.
RFK examines our public health system.
He examines vaccines and Western medicine, pharmaceutical companies, the ways that Americans rely on various pills and other things to help them with all kinds of diseases, ailments, issues, disorders.
And he says there's a problem here.
And I guess for me, that's not common ground.
I think we all know there's a problem here.
It's really hard to find an American that walks around and is like, you know, I really believe in our health system.
It's a good one.
Really like it.
Maybe the 1%, but that's it.
It's really hard to find somebody who thinks that, okay?
And I think that one of the things that you can, a lens you can use, a framework that will help explain RFK. We have a regulatory system.
We have a government system that in many ways was built after World War II. That in the years from the Great Depression to World War II, we had the New Deal.
And then after the war, there was this overwhelming American prosperity because the European nations, for the most part, were mired in currencies that were deflated, America,
the United States, in those decades, the 40s and 50s and 60s, experienced incredible prosperity.
And that is largely the 40s and 50s and 60s when our system was built and refined.
And I think what's happened here, and this is a thesis I'm writing about and I have bigger ideas about.
Is that many components of that system are no longer working how they're supposed to.
And as soon as I say that, I am fully aware that the system itself in many places and as a whole was built for one kind of American, right?
That if you are a black person in this country, if you are a black woman in this country, if you are somebody who doesn't fit the white Christian framework.
An immigrant, brown skin, and so on and so forth.
I recognize that so much of our system was based on white supremacy.
I'm not overlooking that.
So please don't think that I'm naive to that and I think, oh, our system was great.
It just kind of needs a few tweaks.
I'm totally aware that intentionally the system was based in many ways on white supremacy.
I'm talking about FDR. A lot of people think FDR is their favorite president.
And I used to live in D.C. I used to live in Capitol Hill.
And people would come and visit me, friends and family.
Oh, I want to go see the monuments.
Okay, cool.
Let's go.
Washington, Lincoln, let's go see FDR. Great.
And I always said, we're going to go to the Japanese incarceration memorial before we go to the FDR memorial.
That's my rule.
So, look, Japanese-American.
FDR is not our favorite president.
There's a great artist named Kishi Bashi, and they have a song called F. Delano, FDR, F. Delano, and it's all about how he put Japanese-Americans in camp during the war.
Don't think that I'm just saying, well, we had a perfect system, just needs a little fixing up.
Nope, not doing that.
However, what I am saying is, the system that we have was largely built three generations ago.
And the people who built it, and remember why it was built a certain way, are gone.
And it's like we have a set of tools and a set of operations and a machine that was built by our grandparents and great-grandparents, and most people have forgotten why it was built that way.
And the threats it was meant to protect us against.
So, what do I mean?
We have things like Social Security that came out of the period I'm talking about.
Social Security was designed to help people retire such that they wouldn't be left without a penny when they got to the age where they could no longer work.
It was a way to build a net, a safety net for people at the end of their life to have something to live on.
We have the FDIC that protects The deposits you put in the bank up to a certain amount.
Why?
So that banks can be trusted and people don't take their money out of banks, especially if there's something unstable with the economy.
We have things like unions that are largely forgotten.
It's like, why do we need that and what do they do?
Isn't a union bad?
I have to pay dues and this and that.
Here's my point, is that we can talk about all kinds of things.
Even the federal income tax.
The federal income tax as this thing that bothers us all and we don't want to pay taxes and a lot of our hard-earned money goes to the federal government and so on and so forth.
But we forget when there was no federal income tax, there was no way for those who were born into immense wealth in the Gilded Age, those who were just born with a silver spoon in their mouth, to pay a fair share.
There was no way to even out the playing field such that My point
is that we have a system.
That was built three generations ago.
That includes vaccines.
That includes the FDA. That includes the Health and Human Services.
I mean, that includes so many things.
And the Trump administration and the Trump movement is largely raging against the regulations and the policies, the machine that was built by FDR and all the people after him that put in place this thing.
That is now the American context.
And you can hear that in the clip I want to play for you right now.
It's a clip of a man named Mark Andreessen speaking.
Andreessen is close to Elon Musk.
He has a pretty direct pathway to Donald Trump.
And he's one of the most influential and successful investors in Silicon Valley, part of an investment firm called Andreessen and Horowitz, and so on.
Listen to this clip.
And I think you'll hear what I'm talking about.
The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarvin.
He's also a good friend of mine.
And the way he describes the American system that's running the people, the way he describes it is we are living under FDR's personal monarchy 80 years later without FDR. Right.
And the reason he describes it, he says, look, before FDR, the federal government was actually very small.
Like, the tax rates were, like, super low.
The federal government didn't do very much.
The FDR dramatically, you know, by orders of magnitude, increased the size and scope of the federal government.
He did that for two reasons.
One was the New Deal, and then the other was World War II. And so the federal government that Franklin Roosevelt left behind in 1945 when he passed away was the government that he had built, which he had run the entire time from 1933 to 1945 himself, in which he had staffed himself and he had overseen himself and everything.
And he built this basically this giant structure.
And as Curtis basically says, as long as you had FDR running that.
It could run really well.
And we won World War II and saved the free world and pulled the US out of depression like the whole thing worked and it was great.
But if you let an organization of that size and scope run without its founder CEO for 80 years, you end up with what we have now, which is just like basically an out-of-control bureaucracy, like an out-of-control system in which people can't even make positive change even if they want to.
And again, that's why you could have in the US, you could have reason for optimism, which is, okay, what do you need?
Well, you need another FDR-like figure, but in reverse.
You need somebody and a team of people around them who's actually willing to come in and take the thing by the throat and make the changes.
By the way, make the changes that FDR would probably make if he were here to make them, but he's not, right?
So somebody else has to step up and do that.
It has to be a president because nobody else conceivably has the power to do that.
But we will see how much this president can do.
But that's a lot of what this administration plans to do.
So he mentions Curtis Yarvin at the start, and I'm going to get to Curtis Yarvin in a minute.
I'm Brad Onishi.
This is Straight White American Jesus.
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