RFK Junior
Trump's Doktor Mengele?
Vive la différence? Recent pieces on Robert F. Kennedy Junior, hereinafter referred to as “Junior”, in The Atlantic referring to him as “The most important man in science” and in the Süddeutsche Zeitung under the title “Better dead than immunized”. Man in science? That isn’t even funny, for Junior is the very antithesis of a scientist, in fact comparable in many respects to the horrendous doctor Josef Mengele, who achieved infamy through his “medical experiments” on children at Auschwitz. If you are thinking this is taking things too far, please consider the following.
Mengele was a war criminal, implicated in the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of people, for he was involved in the selection of newly arrived people at Auschwitz for hard labor or immediate extermination in addition to his sadistic activities involving children. But he did not actually, personally, murder anyone. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the actions of Junior, in discouraging vaccinations, in canceling programs at NIH that provide unique treatment lifelines to patients suffering from serious rare diseases, in canceling mRNA research and clinical trials [3], in zeroing out medical research on diseases that especially afflict women and minorities, in gutting our public health institutions, in advocating for diet fads known to impose health risks, and by undermining public trust in the medical profession, will in the end cost at least as many lives as did Dr. Mengele, even though he, like Mengele, will probably not murder anyone with his own hands.
There is another common thread involved here, and that is the attack on science by autocrats. In that regard, Donald Trump shares a common motivation with historical figures like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, for the simple reason that science requires facts, transparency and free, open debate, all characteristics in opposition to the success of autocracy. In science, predictions are compared with reality, and theories which are contradicted by evidence are quickly discarded. At the same time, science does not permit the rejection of knowledge based on the ethnicity of its originator, as Stalin and Hitler did in dictating the rejection of the Theory of Relativity because Einstein was a Jew, or based on its contradiction of political dogma, as for example genetics and evolution in the USSR in the era of Lysenko (and elsewhere by religious fundamentalists). Anther current example is climate change denial, as actively practiced by the GOP since the Reagan presidency and brought to a head under Trump. Science does not permit the exclusion of politically inconvenient information, leading to attacks on the mathematical discipline of statistics in the Soviet era and now in the Trump era.
As a further illustration of the ludicrous twisting of facts in the two Trump administrations and how Junior is involved, kindly hearken back to the spring of 2020, when Trump first stated without any basis in fact that the COVID-19 pandemic would be over by summer, then, months later when the cases and deaths continued to mount stated that if we stopped counting cases and deaths the pandemic would go away. In the current administration, the operative lie is that more than a million Americans did not die, and that the vaccines caused many deaths as well as other ill effects. Rather than taking credit for the accelerated development of two of the three successful vaccines, which saved millions upon millions of lives worldwide, Trump and Junior promote conspiracy myths, pointing to deeply flawed studies and the pronouncements of quacks and “influencers” as evidence while utterly ignoring the Mt. Everest of validated scientific evidence.
Junior and Trump are not new features of the Republican party; quite to the contrary, the science denial aspects have been growing for some time. As early as 1964, Barry Goldwater, of all people, warned of the danger posed by the growing influence of Christian fundamentalists. That influence grew significantly under Reagan, and approached the current level under the presidency of George W. Bush. And of course the fascist aspects have been present since the 1930s when powerful businessmen invented and successfully sold much of the American electorate on the fantasy that capitalism equates to Christianity in the war against godless communism. Now we have “AI” generated images of Trump as a holy man, even baptizing Christ, and Junior posing for a magazine with his hands clutching a rosary. So Goldwater’s warning went unheeded, and his nightmare has been fulfilled.
As it turns out, the adherents to the program of Trump and Junior comprise but a small proportion of the American electorate, albeit a very powerful one due to the monetary influence of the very richest. So it is not a foregone conclusion that the insanity of the past year will continue. It depends entirely on whether or not the large majority of American voters decide to speak out and act. Just in case you are interested in doing something right now, here’s a link to the Stand Up for Science web site [4] where you can sign a petition calling for Junior’s removal, among other things.
I promised to constantly remind my readership of the need for everyone who believes in freedom and democracy to behave in accordance with those beliefs, every day. To remind ourselves of what that means, see
Notes
[1] Nazik, A-K (2026). Lieber sterben als impfen Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr 25 s 3. 31 January
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele
[3] In my recent post https://stephenschiff.substack.com/p/not-even-wrong the existence of beneficial, immune system strengthening side effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was documented, and it was noted that Junior’s intervenion was endangering research in the US aimed at further understanding and extending those effects for lung cancer and melanoma. Subsequently I have learned that a rare dangerous side effect has been tied to traditionally formulated COVID-19 vaccines, specifically those based on the adenovirus. See https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeg3560 for an introduction and links. Thus, in Junior’s case, it goes beyond being not even wrong, if such is even possible.
PS A newly published study reports that COVID deaths in the US were severely underreported in the first two years of the pandemic: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-killed-150-000-more-people-in-its-first-two-years-than-official-toll