Make America Healthy Again and Fascist Psychology

America’s about to be new surgeon general is an anti-science crank, (gift link) who quit her medical training because she was too smart for the medical establishment, who were Getting It All Wrong:

In a chapter in her book titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor,” Dr. Means writes that “when it comes to preventing and managing chronic disease, you should not trust the medical system” (emphasis hers). She believes Americans need to lean into lifestyle changes to stop the chronic disease epidemic: whole-food diets free of added sugar and seed oils, frequent exercise, consistent sleep, decreased exposure to toxins. Should she be confirmed, her interest in “metabolic health” — how the body turns fuel into energy — is likely to be a significant focus of her work.

Dr. Means is right to criticize conventional medicine for demonstrating insufficient curiosity about the roles that diet and environmental factors play in making us sick. I dispute, however, her claims about the precise relationship between healthy habits and cell function. “Our modern diets and lifestyles are synergistically ravaging our mitochondria” is a characteristically berserk, science-ish statement intended to suggest Dr. Means is speaking in the realm of fact rather than hypothesis.

Above all, I reject Dr. Means’s insistence that modern medicine has no role to play in preventing, managing and helping reverse chronic disease. It’s rigid, dogmatic and untrue. It also strikes me as deeply counterproductive.

This is written by Rachel Bedard, who a few months ago was trying to Both Sides the appointment of RFK Jr. to run HHS, but who appears to be getting gradually mugged by reality when it comes to appreciating what these grifting lunatics are actually all about.

Something that isn’t getting nearly enough attention is the considerable extent to which the whole “if you get sick it’s because you have a bad lifestyle” discourse is a core piece of classic fascist psychology, which was always obsessed with eugenics, social Darwinism, and purity fetishes of every kind, especially those related to beliefs about master races being “contaminated” by contact, literal or metaphorical, with vermin-like untermenschen.

I dated a woman in college whose mother was a super nice southern lady wouldn’t swim in a public pool used by black people, because she was sure that black people had “stuff” on them, meaning that their bodies were inherently dirty. This, I was assured, was a common attitude in this lady’s social circles.

I suspect that a huge amount of racism is driven by irrational fears of contamination — anti-miscegenation laws were a prime example of this — and such fears are intimately connected to what have been described as the “mobilizing passions” that fuel fascist political movements.

Now I’m not saying that every Wellness Mom who worships RFK Jr. and has a social influencer platform about how your kids only get sick because they come into contact with “toxins” in the environment is really a crypto-fascist potential supporter of Bobby Brainworm’s plans for a kinder, gentler Aktion T4 program. But what I am suggesting is that a lot of the pseudo-scientific garbage that’s being mongered by the Make America Healthy Again types, about how we’re all being contaminated by toxins in our environment, is connected in complex and disturbing ways to the general psychology of our neo-fascist moment.