Sanewashing RFK Jr.

It’s not just the op-eds — the Times is doing it in ostensibly straight news coverage now:

Most child health experts are adamantly opposed to scaling back fluoridation or immunizations, saying such changes would harm health and trigger outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases.

But many do not reject Mr. Kennedy’s primary diagnosis: There is a child health crisis in America.

“On this particular point he’s right,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and epidemiologist who directs the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.

“But many do not reject Il Duce’s primary diagnosis: there is a train scheduling crisis in Italy.”

Seriously. what the hell is this? Who cares if RFK Jr. has broadly identified a problem if his solutions would make things vastly worse? Like the op-ed Paul discussed yesterday, the idea that if some lunatic SHAKES THINGS UP it can somehow be manipulated to work out in a sensible way you prefer is the kind of logic that leads to President Donald J. Trump in the first place, and unless your top priorities are longstanding priorities of the Republican Party like abortion bans or tax cuts it never works.

One particularly insidiuous sanewashing technique — which this article uses with respect to RFK Jr.s’s crank views on fluoridation, and yet another Times article does straight-up — is to describe RFK Jr. as a vaccine “skeptic”:

At darker moments, contesting this kind of stuff in the wake of the 2024 election—and all the shameless, shameful, unforgivable work the American media did to produce that election’s outcome—feels as absurd as demanding the cannibal presently eating your legs use a knife and fork. In less dark moments, that contestation feels like just about the only form hope can take. The language still exists. Maybe someone will need it, someday, to accomplish some good in the world, while the world still exists. If that’s ever to be possible, then our language has to retain some usefulness, too. It has to be tended.

“Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to be Head of Health and Human Services Dept.,” reads the New York Times headline from Thursday, atop a story by health policy reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg about, well, pretty much what the headline says. We’re fine up to that point. Then there’s the subhed (emphasis mine): “Whether the Senate would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has unorthodox views about medicine, is an open question.” That formulation repeats in the lead paragraph…

“Vaccine skeptic.” “Vaccine skepticism.” What the fuck are we talking about here? I would rather chew through my own wrist like Shelly in The Evil Dead than deploy one of those “Merriam-Webster defines ‘skepticism’ as …” sentences in a blog. I won’t damn do it. But you don’t often encounter a word being used to describe its exact opposite in the pages of one of the English language’s most prominent publications. It’s difficult to imagine a place where you might encounter that sort of usage. That’s not really how language works.

What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known “skepticism” to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and “common sense.” A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they are told. Crucially, a skeptic actually questions, as in seeks answers. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter. A person who rejects empirical knowledge, who refuses the answers that exist while requesting ones more to their liking that flatter their preference for unfounded contrarian gibberish and conspiratorial paranoia, is not a skeptic. They’re the exact opposite of that: a mark. A sucker. A credulous boob.

There is no such thing as an adult “vaccine skeptic” in the year 2024. For all its factual value as a label, you might just as accurately call R.F.K. Jr. an esquilax. Any reasonable questions that a skeptical, critical-minded person might have about how and whether vaccines work can be answered by more hard, clear evidence than a person could exhaust in a year of nonstop research. To practice skepticism in this case, to approach the science of vaccination with a skeptic’s demands, is to learn that vaccines work, and that vaccination as a practice has done incalculable good for humanity. The idea of a “vaccine skeptic” in 2024 is as nonsensical as the idea of a germ theory skeptic. A molecular biology skeptic. A heliocentricity skeptic. A spherical triangle.

The mainstream political press is going to help RFK Jr. bring back polio, because the alternative would be to imply that Donald Trump is totally unfit to be president, and I mean he didn’t use a private email server or something.