By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-28 21:35:46 | Updated at 2025-01-31 06:00:35
2 days ago
The US Senate has the constitutional duty to vet the president’s nominees and ensure that no unfit authoritarians find their way into the White House.
Which brings me to the appointment of brainworm-ridden dilettante Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
There has perhaps never been a Republican Cabinet nominee in history less suited for public office.
RFK’s experience (zero), his temperament (unhinged) and his ideas (extremist) impel the Senate to keep him out of the new presidential administration.
Of course, if RFK hadn’t kissed Donald Trump’s ring during the 2024 presidential race, no Republican would even contemplate supporting a man who, for years, claimed that hog farmers were more dangerous to the United States than Osama bin Laden.
Nor would any of them vote for a nominee who accused “climate deniers” of being “traitors” who should face criminal prosecution in global courts.
RFK now feigns support for unfettered free speech for everyone — well, except for pharmaceutical companies, whose ads he wants to ban.
For all their pro-life posturing, Senate Republicans seem ready to put a man who believes that abortion should be legal until the moment of crowning in charge of the nation’s public health institutions.
While RFK “won’t take sides” on 9/11 conspiracy theories — including, presumably, the one claiming that Jews knew the towers were going to be attacked — he has no problem referring to the National Rifle Association as a “terrorist organization.”
Did you know RFK suggested that COVID was engineered to attack black and Caucasian people, but to spare “Ashkenazi Jews?”
No, I don’t think RFK is antisemitic. I think he’s nuts.
What’s worse, though, is that he’s a danger to public health.
RFK is not merely a critic of COVID vaccines: In 2023, not 2013 or 2003, he claimed there was “no vaccine that is safe and effective.” None.
For years the man has been scaremongering about a vaccine-induced “autism epidemic,” which he nauseatingly compared to a “holocaust.”
He seems to believe that smallpox, polio and measles could have been eliminated with better hygiene.
Now, it’s exceedingly likely that every GOP senator who will end up voting to confirm RFK has fully immunized their own children.
They’ll give RFK a stamp of approval because they’re far more terrified of upsetting Donald Trump than they are of your kids getting sick.
There’s nothing wrong with Kennedy’s stated goal of encouraging people to be healthy “again.” Who isn’t on board with that?
But his paranoia about vaccines, medicine and chemicals along with his Luddite attacks on industrial farming, which feeds hundreds of millions of people, would only make us sicker and poorer.
As Trump himself said less than a year ago — and as New Yorkers already know — RFK is a “Radical Left Lunatic.”
MAGA fans like to rail against “elites.” Well, if RFK wasn’t a scion of a notoriously depraved and wealthy leftist family, he’d be likely to be running a blog for fellow conspiracy theorists who believe the water supply is turning our kids gay.
Instead, he’s pulling in millions spreading paranoia, and worming his way into a position of power.
Yes, Dr. Antony Fauci and his gang destroyed our trust in public health. And yes, RFK was right to warn that Fauci was a wannabe totalitarian despot.
But over decades of theorizing, RFK made that one correct prediction. We shouldn’t treat him like Nostradamus because he accidentally got one right.
Let’s not forget, though, RFK praised COVID lockdowns, some of the most devastating societal and economic decisions in history, because they alleviated “lethal air pollution.”
The way to fix the trust problem is to bring back open scientific inquiry and debate in public health from reputable people — like Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health.
Not to elevate to a position of power an eccentric leftist who promises to investigate chemtrails and ban fluoride.
If none of RFK’s 40 years of nuttiness matters, why even have nomination hearings? The deference Kennedy is getting from some Republicans is unprecedented and embarrassing.
There’s a place in American life for heterodoxy and crackpottery.
That place is not at the top of any of our public-health institutions.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a menace to health, common sense and children.
Voting for him is an abdication of the Senate’s responsibilities to both the citizens and the Constitution.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.
