After quoting Donald Trump at a political rally with Robert Kennedy Jr.,
That is why today I am repeating my pledge to establish a panel of top experts, working with Bobby, to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including auto-immune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and more.
Coming at this from a conspiracy theorist/pseudoscience crank worldview, the one word that should set off immediate alarm bells is “autism.” . . . If you had to list the remaining terms in order of tinfoil hat appeal, they would be infertility, autoimmune disorders, and at a distant fourth, obesity. A reporter covering the speech might also feel compelled to add that the causes which RFK Junior has proposed in the past include not just vaccines but also chemtrails, Wi-Fi, and 5G.
Sounds about right: the candidate who endorses the ludicrous Pizzagate conspiracy theory, tried to overturn an election, and is allied with child-murder-denialist Alex Jones is teaming up with a public figure whose big political issue is opposing vaccines.
Palko continues:
Here’s how the NYT covered that quote in the third paragraph from the end of the article on Kennedy endorsing Trump:
Earlier in the day in Phoenix, at his speech announcing the suspension of his campaign, Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Trump had offered him a role in a second Trump administration, dealing with health care and food and drug policy. In Glendale, Mr. Trump said that, if elected to a second term, a panel of experts “working with Bobby” would investigate obesity rates and other chronic health issues in the United States.
I agree with Palko that this is absolutely ridiculous in the context of the actual quote from Trump. The Times is “sane-washing” Trump and Kennedy, working really hard to take dangerous and extreme positions and treat them as reasonable and normal.
I guess this doesn’t matter to political junkies for whom Kennedy Jr. is associated with anti-vaxx conspiracy theories. To many normies, though, I’m guessing that he’s perceived more as a generic Kennedy heir—maybe they don’t know that he makes Dr. Oz and Andrew Huberman look like purveyors of solid medical advice.
This seems like
another example of how junk science and conspiracy theories have moved from the periphery of our culture to the mainstream, and I agree with Palko that it was bad journalism for the Times to report on that speech and sane-wash it.
Newspapers make mistakes all the time; the reasons for posting this one are: (1) this was the first time I’d heard of “sane-washing,” and (2) it’s scary to see pseudoscience escape the narrow world of Lancet/PNAS/Ted/NPR/Gladwell/Freakonomics and potentially become government policy.
I do think it’s possible that the mainstreaming of pseudoscience into elite discourse through the Lancet/PNAS/Ted/NPR/Gladwell/Freakonomics nexus has made it easier for pseudoscience like election denial and vaccine denial to get elite traction (even if it’s different subset of elites).
On the other hand, Merchants of Doubt, etc: Cigarette companies and fossil fuel companies have been working for many decades to blur the lines between science and propaganda, so maybe this would all be happening even without all the junk science that entered the mainstream in the replication-crisis era. I don’t know.