RFK Jr.’s cousin warned us. Caroline Kennedy said her cousin Bobby is unfit to lead HHS because he’s a “predator” who’s “addicted to power.” In her letter to U.S. Senate leaders, she cited the thousands of needless deaths her cousin had already caused with his deeply cynical anti-vax activism and begged them not to put him in charge of public health for hundreds of millions of Americans.
The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate didn’t listen, and now a lot more people will die needlessly. Here’s just one example of how RFK Jr. is using his power as HHS secretary to kill people: (WAMU.org)
The National Cancer Institute, the Bethesda-based research center that has helped drive a more than 30% decline in U.S. cancer deaths since 1991, is being targeted by Trump administration’s downsizing. The NCI, part of the National Institutes of Health, has long been supported by bipartisan funding and plays a critical role in cancer research globally. The U.S. contributes significantly more money to cancer research than any other country around the world.
Current and former employees report that morale has “tanked” as the administration hollows out the agency, with many scientists leaving in frustration. The cuts are already impacting basic operations at the institute, according to KFF Health News correspondent Rachana Pradhan. Scientists say they are having trouble obtaining basic supplies for their research, while websites containing crucial cancer treatment and diagnostic information that both patients and doctors rely on are not being updated…
In response to the cuts, hundreds of current and former NIH employees, including Chou, have signed the Bethesda Declaration, which openly protests the Trump administration’s actions. The declaration argues that the administration is undermining NIH’s mission, wasting public resources, and harming Americans’ health by slashing research projects.
The situation may worsen significantly if the White House gets its way with Congress. The administration is seeking to slash the Cancer Institute’s budget by nearly 40% next year. If approved, scientists warn that NCI would be forced to suspend new research grants or make severe cuts to existing ones, leading to lab closures and bringing clinical research at the institute to a halt.
Predators who are “addicted to power” tend to commit truly heinous crimes. Ted Bundy was such a man, but no one ever put him in charge of the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people.
At this rate, RFK Jr. might become the most prolific serial killer who ever lived. He has lots of accomplices, including NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, every Republican senator (except McConnell), and Donald Trump.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think the 77,303,568 Americans who voted for Trump are what might be called “accessories before the fact.” Actuarial tables tell us lots of them will become RFK Jr. victims too, whether they believe this is what they voted for or not.
Open thread.
lowtechcyclist
Looks like a brain fart – I think you must’ve meant to put the name of an actual Senator in place of Hair Furor.
SiubhanDuinne
@lowtechcyclist:
I think there’s a missing Oxford comma.
satby
Lots of overlap between people who voted for the felon who are also anti-vax even though people in their families have died of COVID or other preventable disease, and who also resent the science that tells them that junk food, big gulps, and smoking are bad for them.
lowtechcyclist
It still boggles my mind that 50 (51?) Senators voted to confirm this nutcase. It just goes to show how totally the GOP has become a cult.
If we ever have a Dem President again, GOP Senators who say they’re going to vote against that President’s nominees should be reminded at every opportunity of the crazies, drunks, and unqualified bozos that they voted to confirm this year.
Derelict
We were on the verge of developing a vaccine for pancreatic cancer, but Bobby Brainworm thinks it’s better to die than to maybe develop autism from the cancer vaccine. Instead, try a poultice of manure and some coffee enemas.
lowtechcyclist
@SiubhanDuinne:
Jeez, even Collins and Murkowski didn’t take advantage of a free opportunity to vote against him? Dayum.
MagdaInBlack
@SiubhanDuinne: Not like Betty to miss a comma, but I think you’re right. And I bet she fixes it ;-)
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all.
This (emphasis mine):
This is why I have had so much inner conflict, trying to reconcile my belief in the basic goodness of people with the reality that so many voted for this. And, yes, they did vote for it, regardless of whether they claim or believe they actually did.
They were warned. Repeatedly. They refused to heed the words of us “stewpit libtards”.
Suzanne
@satby:
So glad I wasn’t the only one to notice. (Although, a fun fact I learned….. years ago, when I worked for an ad agency, one of our clients made protein bars and shakes. My firm designed the packaging and initial ad campaign for the line. As part of the market research for the product, they analyzed competitors. Turns out…. a Snickers bar has a better nutritional profile than most protein bars.)
But your observation aligns with a trend I have observed, as well, which is this strange and mutant perversion of the idea of “fitness” as being able to do all kinds of stupid things and consume terrible stuff, but still lift weights. A fairly bulky physique is the goal, of course. There’s no female equivalent of this mindset.
bluefoot
I can’t express my horror and fear of the dismantling of our science and healthcare infrastructure and research. So much suffering and death.
I’ve been wondering if cuts at NIH will lead to the critical knowledge databases no longer being updated or maintained – PubMed, PubChem, the various genome databases, the FDA databases of drug approvals, the Orange book (generic drug db), etc. I’ve already encountered pages in OMIM where there is a banner at the top of the page stating the info isn’t being updated. The are also big knowledge databases and collections that are maintained by universities with help from federal grants. The thought of all that accessible knowledge going away is frankly terrifying. And horrifying.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@lowtechcyclist:
Which in itself is revealing about those two.
snoey
@lowtechcyclist: Sen Cassidy, a non-quack MD, had the chance to kill the nomination in committee and chickened out in return for a bunch of “commitments” that RFKjr immediately broke.
Suzanne
@snoey: I remember reading about Cassidy’s concerns at the time, and deluding myself that he just once might actually do the right thing and vote no. I got my hopes up there for a hot second. That was stupid of me. Have to remind myself who the enemy is. There’s no bar low enough.
Baud
It’s easy to say “Fuck Cancer.” It’s harder to vote against it when Cancer is helping one maintain for one’s social status.
NotMax
@Suzanne
The Fox/Stepford bleached, boobed and botoxed to a fare thee well regimen of MAGA women?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@snoey:
It gives clowns like him cover for their vote in those rare instances they might have to actually address people outside the bubble.
It’s basically the ‘Lando Calrissian School of Leadership”:
“It’s not my fault, they told me they fixed it.”
In this case, he “took their word for it” not unlike King’s recent “I took Josh Hawley’s advice” admission. It’s always somebody else’s fault.
Baud
As a reminder, zero Dem Senators voted for this monster.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Originalism. The Founding Fathers smoked tabacky.
//
Baud
Nukular Biskits
I know I’m tilting at windmills here, but what really pisses me off about this is (at least as far as the benighted state of MS) none of the media in the state are even trying to question US Senators Roger Wicker & Cindy Hyde-Smith about any of this anti-science flapdoodlery at HHS. BOTH supported, cheered and voted for Kennedy’s confirmation.
Instead, I get stupid brain-rotting shit like this from the major newspaper here in the state, the Clarion Ledger:
Baud
Jasmine Crockett on the cover of Vogue.
Betty Cracker
@lowtechcyclist: Fixed, thanks.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Don’t tell Ms. Biskits, but I’m in love!
Suzanne
@NotMax: Yeah, but the MAGA appearance standard for women isn’t really tied to fitness. More to extreme dieting and expensive cosmetic procedures, expensive hair, and Republican makeup (look it up, it’s funny).
ALSO, thx for the link about the seaweed concrete. That is cool as hell and Imma share it with some of my structural engineering friends!
rattlemullet
This administration is nothing more than “criminals serving criminals”.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
Your not really my type.
NotMax
FYI.
Many years ago I learned from those who should know at Marvel (Stan Lee included) that Galactus does not wear a helmet. What looks like a helmet is part of his head.
Make of that what you will.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I think it’s not real, but it SHOULD be.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
DAMN YOU BAUD! I SNORTED GOOD COFFEE OUT MY NOSE AGAIN, YOU BASTARD! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
My bad. Thanks.
Elizabelle
Did you know that the WaPost, owned by one inch dick Jeff Bezos, will not allow reader commenters to call RFK Jr a “predator” in the comments, even when directly quoting his cousin Caroline, who went on the record with her observations? Which is “news,” Jeff.
I have tried several times, and did get “predator” past once in a very anodyne comment.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
Sounds like Bezos if finally doing something about WrongThink.
MagdaInBlack
@Betty Cracker: Was it the “Mike Johnson: The Orange Turds New Bitch” headline that gave it away?
And yes, it sure should be real. All of it.
kindness
I thought I read yesterday that RFK Jr was going to fire all 16 members of the Cancer TX Board because they were too ‘woke’. Sorry Bobby, but if you were on fire when I walked by, I wouldn’t bother to piss on you to put it out, no matter how tempting that might be. I wouldn’t call authorities either.
Scout211
@Betty Cracker: @Baud: @MagdaInBlack:
Jasmine Crockett did get a profile in Vogue in October of 2024. But no cover, yet.
David_C
I would suggest listening to the piece to hear my friend, Sylvia, too. On Monday, an invited delegation of public signers of the Bethesda met with the NIH Director to express their concerns. There are dissenters within the federal government risking their careers to warn people of the consequences of this administration’s actions. Scientists have a stubborn regard for the truth.
scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-changes-at-nih-epa-nasa-nsf-spark-internal-disse…
caphilldcne
@kindness: this is true.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/rfk-health-screening-panel-members-c308cbb0?st=EBnfDc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
(should be a shareable link)
David_C
Even Senate Republicans, who happen to have flagship university medical centers that receive NIH funding, are speaking out.
politico.com/news/2025/07/25/britt-leads-letter-urging-trump-administration-to-release-delayed-nih-f…
different-church-lady
Oh they listened. They just didn’t care.
CaseyL
Saying the Senators who voted to confirm RFKJ “didn’t know” or “didn’t realize” is like saying the people who went to the Wannsee Conference didn’t realize what the cattle cars and gas cylinders were for.
They knew. They approved.
The GOP is composed entirely of grifters and mass murderers.
Jackie
@Betty Cracker:
I WISH it was real! I’d buy and frame it! LOL
bjacques
@David_C: now that the Face-Eating Leopards are looking hungrily their way.
different-church-lady
@Baud: How the freak can anyone drink a handle of vodka a day without dying?
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
The best GOP politician continues to be worse than the worst Dem politician.
Shalimar
@David_C: I am guessing most people want the University of Alabama to suffer. Britt will not get much sympathy even though she’s right.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I’m still working on the Hunter Biden interview. I just listened to all of the Julie K. Brown interview yesterday.
Betty Cracker
@Shalimar: It’s the opposite side of the MAGA coin, and yeah, unfortunately, it’s a thing.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
Yeah. 100%.
Which is why I’ve held my nose and voted for some real turds over the years — Sinema, I’m looking at you!
Nukular Biskits
@David_C:
Leopards. Faces.
Betty Cracker
@David_C: Huh. Neither of Florida’s right-wing shitbag senators bothered to sign on to Britt’s effort, even though the state’s research universities are losing millions in funding.
lowtechcyclist
@CaseyL:
Not to mention, it’s their fucking job to know. It’s not like it wasn’t clear who and what he was.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady: I dunno, but my dad was a serious alcoholic before he, like Hunter, went into rehab, and it seems to me like he might have been able to do it.
David_C
@Shalimar: I read where UAB is the state’s second largest employer. Others have noted the leopards/faces argument, but The Battle is the size of the NIH budget for FY26. The DOGE actions and the New Rules are bad enough, but a 40% cut would be of Death Star proportions.
Any indications that we may not see the Death Star are signs of hope. The thing is, my friends and I are not passive observers. It’s not easy to buck the system, but I’ll take nudges in the right direction.
@Betty Cracker: I should have checked the names for Cornyn’s. TX has major institutions.
u
@Nukular Biskits: Well, I gave up any illusions about the basic goodness of people when I was about twelve years old. The past ten years (the “age of Trump”) have demonstrated the shittiness of the “average American”, but there’s a much longer history. I was twelve when Martin Luther King was murdered, and a lot of adults (not my parents) in my blue collar town responded to the killing with approval, and pasted “George Wallace for President” bumper stickers on their cars. Two years later the same people were happy about the Kent State killings. There’s a long history of shit people in this country. The cult of Trump is just the lates version of that.
u
I don’t pay much attention to RFK Junior’s gibberish; I just assume that it’s all a combination of grifting and lunacy. But I saw something today that caught my eye. Apparently now Junior is touting rfench fries made with beef tallow as a good way to Make America Healthy Again. WTF??? I guess that at this point he’s saying the craziest stuff that pops into his head, just to say how many people will follow it.
Martin
I think this is an effort to oversimplify. On health issues like this, my sense is that there aren’t big coalitions (powerful ones maybe) but a lot of diversified thought that usually don’t get strongly mapped onto politics because there aren’t reliable through-lines to build campaigns around. Even smoking – only 11% of the US population smokes, and we know some fraction of them are trying to quit. Even if they were all in the GOP, they’d be a minority there. Anti-smoking ordinances aren’t unpopular even in red states.
I think most of this stuff if anything gets wrapped up in the rugged individualist mindset of the government shouldn’t tell us how to behave, and yet, its red state voters that are the most animated about cracking down on opioid availability. The most recent poll I saw showed that ⅔ of Republicans still want schools to require childhood vaccines. Only 6% of Americans oppose fluoridation in water so even if they’re all in the GOP, that’s wildly unpopular among Republicans.
None of it maps very cleanly onto our politics, and a lot of what RFK and some states are doing seem to not be supported even by Republican voters. I think it’s a mistake to assume that just because the authoritarians are doing a thing, that the people who voted or them want that thing done. In fact, that’s sort of the whole concept of authoritarianism is that they take control and then do whatever the fuck they want, and not what the voters want, even their supporters.
Ramona
RFK Jr should be the first Cabinet member to be impeached. I hope canceling cancer research should be enough to get him convicted.
Ramona
@Baud: She’s beautiful and brilliant!
Martin
@u: I think the sugar in coke and the beef tallow in French fries are kind of a different thing.
In the case of sugar, we moved off of sugar mainly due to lobbying by the corn industry who cast sugar as being worse for us. Turns out it’s not – that was a lie that people our age have internalized. They’re both equally bad for you. And if people like sugar coke better, and dialing back the corn ag dial and up the sugar ag dial might help to diversify our ag sector then why not?
It’s less clear in the case of tallow – tallow is a lot of saturated fat relative to seed oil, but seed oil has their own problems so its probably worse, but maybe not as much worse as the <checks notes> corn lobby made it out to be when they were pushing for corn oil to replace tallow. I think that one is less neutral, but I do think there is merit in at least undoing some of the nutritional lies that we were told and have internalized. Butter vs margarine, for instance, which <checks notes> was also the corn lobby.
For tallow vs seed oil, there’s studies showing the omega-6 in the latter contribute to Alzheimers, arthritis, diabetes and depression and there are direct links to increased chronic pain with omega-6. By comparison tallow’s saturated fat contributes to heart disease. What scientists say is ‘stop eating so much of all of this stuff’ which is likely the correct answer but as to which of the above conditions to trade out is tough to say. We’ve gotten MUCH better at treating heart diseases since the movement toward seed oils so it’s a bit less of a threat than it used to be. There’s another category of vegetable fats like olive oil that are low omega-6 which is why they are often recommended.
Scientists are kind of coming to a consensus that since they’re all bad in different ways, use a little of each (that is, tallow really isn’t that bad for you) and try and cut back on the use of oil/fat overall.
RFK jumping all the way to ‘tallow is better for you’ doesn’t seem to be something any scientist agrees with. I think one of the bigger problems here is that we too often let some industry group lie to us in ads about the relative safety of foods, scientists gently try to correct for that, the public gets confused ‘which is it’, overlooking which group told them which message. The media sensationalize shit all the time making the problem worse, and the complexity of the whole thing makes people distrust all of it and revert back to ‘this was all simpler in the 19th century, let’s just do what they did then’ which is the nature of RFKs crackpottery. I mean, we fed people literal poison in the 19th century, no, it wasn’t all better then.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: ‘the orange turd’s new bitch’ wasn’t a giveaway?
u
@Martin: Those “rugged individualists” in red states — whose asses are constantly being subsidized by taxpayers in blue states. I live in New Jersey which I think has the highest ratio of federal taxes paid to federal benefits received. I’m still hoping for thank you notes from those goobers in Alabama, Kansas and Kentucky — but the cards seem to always get lost in the mail.
u
@Martin: Yes; let’s go back to the Good Old Days of the 19th century, when Americans were lucky to live into their forties. RFK Junior has always been a huckster, a con man. That’s what he was for decades before he joined forces with Trump. He cares nothing about the health of anyone other than himself; if he did he’d be opposing the Trump Administration’s cuts to the FDA, Medicaid, SNAP, the EPA, the VA, etc. Just a despicable human being. I wish that Cheryl Hines would kick his ass out the door, but I guess that she’s making money on the grift too.
u
@Martin: The whole beef tallow fetish reminds me of the Golden Age of the Atkins diet a couple of decades ago. I never tried it myself, but in the (I.T.) office where I worked several guys would invite themselves into my cubicle every morning to brag about how many eggs and how much bacon they had eaten for breakfast. (It was only guys — I never met a woman who tried that diet.). They all got bored after a month or two and went back to gobbling pretzels and cookies.
Martin
@u: Look, I’m not advocating for this, don’t get me wrong. But you can’t engage with what you don’t understand.
And I’ve argued the Epstein/deep state thing comes out of a sense that the world is too complicated and would be much easier to navigate if we just knew that all of the bankers and CEOs and democrats were evil pedophiles. Similarly, I’m arguing that people who are confused about what is safe to eat and what isn’t are likely to be attracted to the diets from a time when those arguments aren’t being made. They aren’t looking for food safety, they’re looking for confidence. They just want to eat their french fries without having to worry if it’s killing them or not because people tell them all these contradictory things and they just want them to shut up. Beef tallow french fries are what they remember from McDonalds when they were kids, they remember them being great, and they just want to disappear into the nostalgia of being able to enjoy french fries without worrying about omega-6s and saturated fats.
My argument is that society is running up against a cognitive overload to understand to navigate decisions around us. It affects different people in different ways and we respond to it differently as well. I don’t know really how to address that. I’m pretty sure throwing more scientific data at the public when there are moneyed interests that are going to counter that data is likely to make things worse rather than better. I think at the end of the day, we need to simplify the world we live in, ideally in non-damaging ways, which is hard as capitalism seeks complexity because that’s how you make money. But if making McDonalds french fries taste better and relatively guilt-free allows the public to better accept childhood vaccines, that’s a trade I think we should make. (It doesn’t work that way).
But I see a lot of the RFK crackpottery as a different solution to the same problem that I think drives the deep state conspiracy theory. Thought of another way, is the Democrats consolidation around the college educated professional class vs the GOP now consolidating around the working class the product of a society that was built for and can be understood better by college graduates than non college graduates, and maybe we shouldn’t have a society where a degree in economics is needed to invest and save enough for retirement, or know if it’s a good time to buy a house, or what have you. Maybe part of the issue here is that Trump offers very simple, confident (and wrong) answers to problems and that’s really what people are seeking, and we aren’t countering with simple, confident, and right answers.
I will again point to one of Mamdani’s policies that much to my surprise got pretty high national support for which was government run grocery stores. The GOP answer to not having a grocery store in your town is ‘fuck you’. The Dem answer is ‘let’s spend $10M in taxpayer dollars to create incentives for Kroger to open stores in these neighborhoods’. Mamdani’s answer is ‘just have the government open a store and run it at cost’.
I think everyone is indexing on that being the socialist solution and ‘oh no, Dems need to run on socialist ideas’. But it’s also a really simple direct solution. Something like 30% of republicans like that idea. Maybe the lesson from Mamdani is to run with simple solutions and not worry about what ideology they happen to fit into.