American freak show

Conspiratorial nut case nepo baby fail son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants you to take an online test to see if you have what it takes to work for him at Health and Human Services. The test doesn’t measure if you know anything about medicine or public health. Instead:

And yet, after that first round of personality disentangling, RFK’s assessment gets much more specific, and, somehow, even more bizarre. The quiz presented me with a lengthy list of strange personal insecurities, and asked me to highlight the five that I identified with most. That sounds straightforward enough, but the available choices coalesced into a majorly unwell person. One reads, “I tend to have unstable and intense personal relationships, where I alternate between extremes of idealizing and devaluing another.” Another adds, “I don’t have that much interest in having sexual experiences with another person,” which I choose to interpret as a smart bit of incel coalition management. Speaking for myself, I was self-aware enough to check off “I require excessive admiration,” but I made sure to leave out “I don’t feel much empathy for others” to ensure that the next regime doesn’t peg me as a sociopath. (This is also where the question about “having clairvoyance” surfaces, but honestly, compared to the other options, it might be among the least distressing of the bunch.)

And just like that, the test was over. I was presented no score or evaluation, just a terse “thank you” and the end of the line. I suppose I must live with the fact that the government now possesses a record of my darkest inclinations—an RFK-ified survey of my morality—but I don’t get the sense that he’s gotten any better sense of whether I’m a fit or not for Health and Human Services. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising, because when journalist Timothy Burke dug into who, exactly, is responsible for this deeply strange audit, he learned that the publishing company is called ExamCorp. ExamCorp’s president? None other than Jordan Peterson, the psychologist turned right-wing gadfly.

I know we’ve all grown numb to the outrageous stupidity of this political climate, but I don’t think we can hammer this point home hard enough. Robert F. Kennedy—a guy who dumped a bear carcass in Central Park—is set to take on a paramount role in the health policy of this country. Helping him round out his staff? Peterson, who is closer to the levers of power than ever before. What a horrific timeline. This carnival of MAGA grift will continue to blob out until it blocks out the sun. It can, and will, get worse from here. Hey, maybe I am clairvoyant after all.

Hey, but RFK Jr. does have some good ideas, like we have too much chronic disease and should have less (if you can figure out how that counts as an idea you may have a future writing op-eds for our nation’s leading newspapers).

That this 41-car pileup of a human being is actually going to be the top health official in the American government sums up the utter insanity of making Donald Trump president. Good job, 49.79% of American voters.

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”

H.L. Mencken