Clear Thinking v. Robert F. Kennedy Jr

This is, after all, a philosophy blog. And of all the features of this historical moment that would seem to merit at least a brief cul-de-sac is, well, the unlikely ascension of America's most notorious vaccine skeptic to its highest public health office. None other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—environmental lawyer turned conspiracy theorist turned Health and Human Services Secretary.

In the pantheon of intellectual dishonesty, few positions are as morally bankrupt as vaccine denialism. It occupies a special category of dangerous nonsense—one that directly translates abstract misinformation into concrete suffering. When Kennedy orders a search for “new measles treatments” rather than forcefully advocating for the vaccine that prevents measles with 97% effectiveness, we are witnessing not just a policy failure but an ethical collapse.

Let's be absolutely clear about what's happening: Two young girls are dead. Hundreds are infected. And the Secretary of Health and Human Services is suggesting cod liver oil as a response while questioning the safety of one of the most thoroughly studied and demonstrably effective vaccines in human history.

This isn't just wrong. It's obscene.

What makes Kennedy's position particularly insidious is how it masquerades as reasonable skepticism. “We don't know the risks of many of these products because they're not safety tested,” he claims—a statement that manages to pack multiple layers of falsehood into a single sentence. The MMR vaccine has undergone extensive safety testing across decades and continents. Its risks are well-documented and vanishingly small compared to the diseases it prevents. This isn't a matter of opinion or perspective—it's a matter of empirical fact.

Kennedy's propensity for Gish Galloping—a rhetorical technique named after creationist Duane Gish who would overwhelm scientific opponents by rapidly presenting many specious arguments in succession—serves as both shield and weapon. “A study in 1987 revealed this,” “research in Sweden showed that,” he'll rattle off, leaving his audience with the impression of scholarly depth. But fact-checkers have repeatedly shown that Kennedy's impressive-sounding references are often completely fabricated or wildly misrepresented.

This technique creates the illusion of evidence-based reasoning while actually short-circuiting genuine evidence evaluation. It overwhelms listeners with rapid-fire, plausible-sounding claims that defy real-time fact-checking, relying on the fact that most people won't have the specialized knowledge or time to verify his claims.

The true perversity here is that despite being repeatedly exposed as manufacturing evidence, Kennedy's sophistry is often believed over the consensus of published medical research. This isn't just a failure of critical thinking—it's a collapse of the very foundations that make democratic deliberation possible.

The notion that the efficacy or safety of the MMR vaccine should be called into question as a result of real or perceived dishonesty during the COVID-19 pandemic shows the truth of our epistemic collapse in stark contrast. Even if we were to believe the various conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccines, even if we accept that Fauci told a noble lie about masks, it does not invite the question as to whether cod liver oil can fight measles. This is nonsense. Yet, this is exactly what has happened.

This collapse of critical thinking—this inability to maintain distinct categories, to evaluate each claim on its own evidential merits—is the hallmark of conspiratorial thinking. It creates a kind of epistemic contagion where doubt about one medical intervention spreads to all others, regardless of their independent evidence base or historical track record. The MMR vaccine, developed in the 1960s and administered to billions of children worldwide, becomes guilty by imagined association with completely unrelated medical interventions developed half a century later.

Kennedy's dangerous misinformation doesn't exist in a vacuum. It thrives within a sociotechnical architecture specifically evolved to fragment shared reality and reward epistemic tribalism. We face not just one man's dangerous ideas but an entire ecosystem designed to dissolve truth into preference.

The fragmentation of media environments has created what sociologists call “enclaves”—sealed information communities where facts aren't validated against external reality but against group belonging. Within these enclaves, the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge—scientists, journalists, academic institutions—are systematically delegitimized, their authority replaced by self-appointed “truth-tellers” like Kennedy whose qualification is not expertise but willingness to confirm what the enclave already believes.

This fragmentation is supercharged by algorithmic curation that optimizes not for accuracy but for engagement. Platforms don't distinguish between medical consensus and dangerous conspiracy—they simply measure which content keeps users scrolling, commenting, sharing. And nothing drives engagement like outrage, fear, and the intoxicating sense of insider knowledge that conspiracy theories provide. When Kennedy claims he's revealing suppressed truths about vaccines, he's not just spreading misinformation—he's offering a product perfectly designed for our digital attention economy.

Perhaps most insidious is the weaponization of anecdote against data. When a parent shares a heartbreaking story attributing their child's condition to vaccination—regardless of scientific validity—that singular narrative easily overwhelms statistical reality in human cognition. We are wired to respond to stories, not statistics. Kennedy masterfully exploits this cognitive bias, elevating individual anecdotes over epidemiological evidence, personal testimonials over peer-reviewed research. The result is a discourse where “I heard about a child who...” trumps decades of safety data involving millions of children.

This machinery of epistemic dissolution connects Kennedy to Yarvin, to the All-In crowd, to TikTok-informed voters—all symptoms of a collapse in shared validation structures that transcends any single issue. When the Secretary of Health and Human Services can promote cod liver oil over vaccines during a deadly measles outbreak, we're witnessing not just one man's dangerous ideas, but the culmination of a decades-long project to dismantle the very concept of authoritative knowledge.

Kennedy's approach employs the same intellectual smoke machines we've dissected in previous essays. Just as Curtis Yarvin obscures his reactionary politics behind walls of verbose historical references, just as Bitcoin maximalists transform an economic position into a moral hierarchy, Kennedy uses the language of “medical freedom” and “informed consent” to mask what is, at its core, a rejection of the scientific method itself.

Consider the twisted logic at work: Rather than preventing a deadly disease with a proven vaccine, Kennedy proposes we should focus on treating the disease after children have already contracted it. This isn't just inefficient—it's perverse. It's akin to removing all guardrails from a dangerous mountain road and then investing in better ambulance services at the bottom of the cliff.

The spokesman's statement that they aim “to support all families, regardless of their vaccination status” reveals the moral confusion at the heart of this position. It conflates respect for autonomy with abdication of responsibility. It treats the decision to reject vaccination not as a dangerous error that endangers both individual children and public health, but as a lifestyle choice worthy of accommodation and respect.

Bodily autonomy is certainly an important right. But so is collective safety. The Enlightenment liberals who founded this country understood that liberty rests on a balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility. These notions are memorialized in the constitution itself. Our Founders explicitly gave Congress taxation powers, commercial regulation powers and gave Congress the power to provision for the general welfare.

What's particularly striking is how this inverts Kennedy's purported commitment to prevention over treatment. For decades, Kennedy has positioned himself as an environmental champion focused on preventing exposure to toxins. Yet when presented with a proven method to prevent childhood illness, he suddenly pivots to emphasizing treatment over prevention. The inconsistency is glaring—and revealing of the ideological rather than scientific nature of his position.

Kennedy didn't emerge from nowhere. He stepped into a vacuum created by liberalism's retreat from its own epistemic foundations. The question isn't just why Kennedy promotes dangerous nonsense, but why liberal institutions have proven so ineffective at defending even their most basic truth claims.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a real-time case study in this failure. Rather than using the crisis to rebuild public trust in scientific institutions, liberal leadership treated scientific communication as a marketing problem. When guidelines changed as knowledge evolved—a normal feature of scientific inquiry—officials often concealed uncertainty rather than explaining it. When legitimate questions arose about trade-offs between different public health measures, many liberal voices reflexively labeled all questioning as denialism rather than engaging substantively. Communication focused on compliance rather than understanding, on slogans rather than explanations.

This technocratic approach abandoned the field of meaning-making to the reactionaries. Vaccine policy became framed not as a collective project of public health but as an authoritarian imposition—and liberal leadership lacked the moral vocabulary to effectively counter this framing. Instead of articulating a positive vision of shared scientific understanding and collective responsibility, mainstream liberalism retreated to proceduralism and expert deference, leaving the deeper human hunger for meaning and agency unaddressed.

The Trump administration's elevation of Kennedy to this position didn't happen in a vacuum. Republican Senators voted to confirm him knowing full well his history of dangerous misinformation on vaccines. The blood of these children is on their hands. They had access to all the evidence of Kennedy's long record of fabrications, his hostility to basic public health principles, his repeated false claims about vaccines—and they confirmed him anyway.

This isn't just a failure of judgment; it's a moral abdication. These Senators understood the risks. They knew that placing a notorious vaccine skeptic in charge of the nation's public health apparatus during rising measles outbreaks would likely have devastating consequences. Yet they chose party loyalty over public safety, political expediency over children's lives.

Behind this incoherence lies a deeper pattern we've observed in other contexts: the collapse of necessary tensions. Just as Objectivism collapses the tension between self-interest and social good, just as Bitcoin maximalism collapses the tension between sound money principles and public welfare, Kennedy's approach collapses the tension between personal choice and collective responsibility that is essential to public health.

Public health inherently involves balancing individual autonomy with community protection. It requires holding both values in creative tension rather than sacrificing either entirely. The vaccine skeptic movement fails to hold this tension—it elevates absolute personal choice above all other considerations, including the safety of the most vulnerable among us.

What makes this collapse particularly dangerous is how it erodes the epistemic foundations necessary for democratic governance. When the nation's top health official suggests that extensively tested vaccines might be unsafe while promoting unproven supplements, he doesn't just make a policy error—he undermines the shared reality upon which democratic decision-making depends.

This is why vaccine denialism connects directly to the constitutional crisis I've documented elsewhere. Both represent attacks on the infrastructure of shared meaning-making that makes democratic governance possible. Both substitute ideological certainty for empirical reality. Both collapse the tensions necessary for nuanced thinking into simplistic absolutes.

The doctors in West Texas who reported children given toxic levels of vitamin A represent the human cost of this epistemic collapse. These aren't abstract philosophical disagreements—they're concrete harms inflicted on real children by parents who have been misled by those in positions of authority.

When Kennedy claims that Mennonites have “religious objections” to shots because they contain “fetus debris,” he's not making a good-faith error. He's propagating a falsehood that has been repeatedly debunked. There is no fetal tissue in the MMR vaccine. Mennonites have no religious doctrine banning vaccination. These are not matters of perspective or interpretation—they are straightforward factual claims that are demonstrably false.

This is where the moral weight of clear thinking becomes unavoidable. When falsehoods lead directly to children's deaths, clarity isn't just an intellectual virtue—it's a moral imperative. The “both sides” approach to vaccine safety isn't balanced or open-minded; it's a dangerous abdication of responsibility that privileges comfortable falsehoods over uncomfortable truths.

What Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics offer is not an alternative perspective deserving equal consideration. It's a collapse of coherent thinking that substitutes conspiracy for causality, anecdote for evidence, and intuition for investigation. It belongs in the same category as Flat Earth theory or Holocaust denial—claims that can be entertained only by abandoning the basic epistemic standards necessary for functional democratic discourse.

When a society reaches the point where it debates whether measles should be prevented or treated with cod liver oil, we are witnessing something more profound than policy disagreement. We are watching civilization actively unlearning itself.

The measles vaccine represents one of humanity's genuine triumphs—a collective achievement that spared generations of children from suffering and death. Before vaccination, measles killed millions worldwide each year. The development of an effective vaccine wasn't just a scientific achievement but a moral one—a deliberate choice to protect the vulnerable, to spare the next generation from a burden the previous one had carried.

This is the true weight of what's at stake. When Kennedy undermines vaccination, he's not just making a policy choice—he's breaking a covenant between generations. He's dismantling the hard-won knowledge that previous generations sacrificed to obtain and preserve. He's saying that the suffering of those who came before us, who witnessed measles wards filled with dying children, counts for nothing against his ideological commitments.

The center must be held—not to protect the past, but to protect what little future we still deserve. Two plus two still equals four. Measles still kills children. The truth still matters.

This is why vaccine denialism isn't merely wrong—it's a form of civilizational suicide. It represents the willful rejection of the accumulated wisdom that makes social progress possible at all. If we cannot agree that preventing deadly diseases in children is better than treating them after they're infected, what possible basis remains for collective decision-making?

In the circus of our collapsing meaning-making structures, the flood of unreason rises. But some truths must remain non-negotiable. Some realities cannot be surrendered to perspective or preference. The ground approaches. And in this moment of acceleration, of increasing pressure to surrender your perception to authority, of growing penalties for those who insist on seeing clearly—remembering what's real isn't just resistance. It's survival.

Two children are dead who didn't need to die. Hundreds more are suffering needlessly. And the man charged with protecting public health is undermining one of humanity's greatest tools for preventing suffering.

This isn't a matter of perspective. It's a matter of life and death. And clear thinking demands that we name it for what it is.