RFK Jr's speech and the Party of State Expertise

About half the people I follow online seem to have said “you should go watch RFK’s speech” by now (the one in which he announced the suspension of his campaign). I will add to that chorus and say, if you have the time, it was a good speech. IM-1776 also has a transcript of it. Of what were our three major candidates, RFK was the most intellectual, and his speeches had a lecture-bent to them. “Let me just tell you how things are now.” Andrew Snyder, reacting to the speech, commented that it’s strange to hear a US politician saying important and specific things.

Putting myself in RFK’s shoes, it’s a little sad that, I suspect, the most replayed parts of the speech will be the “look what the Democratic Party has become” parts. For him, I think the stuff about chronic diseases and children is the part he would most like you to remember. Let me quote a snippet of that.

We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth, and the average American who died from COVID had on average 3.8 chronic diseases. So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction. And no other country has anything like this. Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago that number was less than 1%. So we’ve gone from 1% to 66%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children… In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3% compared to our 50%.

Here, half of Americans have prediabetes or type two diabetes. When my uncle was president, when I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire 40 or 50-year career. Today, one out of every three kids who walks to his office is diabetic or prediabetic…. There’s been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was 1 in 1,500. Now autism rates in kids are 1 in 36, according to the CDC. Nobody’s talking about how 1 in every 22 kids in California has autism….

…

About 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. That’s like one out of every five. That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%, and one in four American women is on antidepressant medication, 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, and half a million children are on SSRIs.

So what’s causing this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First and the worst is ultra-processed foods. 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed, which means industrially manufactured in a factory.  These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Laboratory scientists, many of whom formerly worked for the cigarette industry which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and ‘80s, deployed thousands of scientists to invent new chemicals to make the food more addictive. And these ingredients didn’t exist a hundred years ago, humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe. But they are ubiquitous in American processed foods. 

The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine, and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. This assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. And to name just one problem: many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America’s puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the earth…

Now, I am no expert on food additives, so I’m not going to tell you to avoid this chemical, but this one over here is fine. I don’t know those details. I feel very safe saying that the human body is a complex system, not understood nearly as well as we’d like. And therefore it is generally better to give it simple things close to what humans have been consuming for thousands of years, as opposed to novel complex chemical concoctions. I’m not saying I do a good job of that personally, but that seems like good sense! But whether this or that chemical is dangerous, harder to say.

But it did strike me - and I know this will seem tautological, because Kennedy is yesterday’s Democrat - but yesterday’s Democratic Party would have found plenty to appreciate in RFK’s speech. “Big corporations are putting additives in our foods and medications that are making us sicker” - amen, preach it brother, they would have said. But in today’s world, RFK has found himself only condemned by that side, called a conspiracy theorist, and so on. Television networks cut off his speech midway through so their anchors could talk about what a bad person he is instead. You can’t say those things as a citizen-in-good-standing anymore.

Why not? Because the Democratic Party (and allied media) is now the Party of State Expertise. And if the State Experts (at the FDA, USDA, CDC, whatever) have decreed that the Thing is safe, then it is safe. To question that at all constitutes misinformation or disinformation - that is what those words mean, to call into question the truth of an official state proclamation. They have nothing to do with whether what you are saying is true or not (indeed, the crazy lies are no threat to them, it’s the truths or the nearly-truths they find troubling). And the allied media will label you a conspiracy theorist or some similar stop-thought word.

This shift happened most dramatically during COVID, which we may be grateful for at least inasmuch as it made lots of trends bubbling under the surface now visible to everyone. Pre-COVID… yeah I know, there was skepticism of vaccination, for example, on both the Left and Right. Some of y’all are thinking “I’m a conservative, and I’ve been skeptical of vaccines since 1947!”. But at least give me that the stereotype was that the “liberal hippie” type was the main skeptic. Or at least give me that there were a lot of those folks, at least. You see this in satire songs like Remy’s pre-COVID Affluenflammation where the vaccine skeptics / people against genetically modified foods are hippie-types. No more. Those folks in COVID found themselves attacked by their own side, and either had an awakening about how the world works now, or changed themselves to fall into line with the Party.

That just goes to my regular point that the Left is abandoning its remnant liberalism (plenty of that still in RFK, that’s why he isn’t welcome anymore) and becoming, consistently, the party of statism.

THE END

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Photo from our life

I think I may sort of steal from Matt Shapiro just the thought that… nice to have something a little lighthearted at the end of each post. So maybe a photo. So here you go. The college students have returned to East Lansing, and it feels like the population of our little section of the city has gone up by a factor of ten within the last week, it’s somewhat amazing to watch that happen. (Not everyone in the photo below trying to get on that extra-length articulated bus got on that bus, because it was full. And “full bus” in East Lansing doesn’t mean every seat was taken, it means every seat was taken, and the people standing up were jammed like sardines, and you just couldn’t fit another person on that bus. You can do that to college students and they won’t complain, you know.)

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