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The victory of Donald Trump this week is, frankly, a gut punch to anybody who cares about the world or the people in it. We can take several immediate lessons from the results. Firstly, it was unfair of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party to expect their base to turn out for a candidate who, as part of the current administration, refused to meaningfully oppose the war in Gaza: that backfired on her. Secondly, it was strategically foolish for Harris to largely gloss over her positive domestic agenda and instead centre her campaign on a lovefest with a Right-wing warmonger like Liz Cheney, which resoundingly failed to win over supposedly ‘moderate’ Republicans and further alienated progressives. Thirdly, despite Harris rightly emphasising her commitment to reproductive rights, white women still broke for Trump, a serial sexual abuser whose Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade: it turns out that the US is a nation of Karens.
Among the multitude of horrifying prospects for a new Trump term, one seems particularly sinister. The week before the election, while most of the media attention was focused on Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – formerly an independent candidate for the presidency who endorsed Trump in August – claimed in a zoom meeting with supporters that Trump had promised him control of public health agencies if he retook the White House. Kennedy happens to be among America’s most notorious purveyors of anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories.
A member of America’s Kennedy dynasty and nephew of the former president, RFK Jr. is a prestigiously educated environmental lawyer who spent much of the 1980s and 1990s suing corporations over river pollution and fighting for the rights of indigenous people to be protected from, and compensated for, extractive industry on their lands, earning him widespread acclaim and respect as an environmentalist.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, his focus began to shift, and since the 2010s in particular, he has been amplifying discredited and scientifically illiterate hokum about a causal link between childhood vaccines and autism. By the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was among America’s leading anti-vaxx activists, claiming that the vaccines were causing mass injury and death, and that wearing a face mask was akin to slavery.
Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaxx campaign organisation chaired by Kennedy, released a ‘documentary’ in 2021 in which they played on a long and real history of medical racism in the US to insinuate that the COVID vaccines were being forced on black Americans as a kind of medical experiment. He also falsely claimed that the disease itself was targeted towards black people and Caucasians, and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people were more immune. Having a nutcase like this in control of national public health agencies in the US could easily lead to a mass resurgence of preventable diseases like polio and measles, of which there are already worrying early signs.
In his recent book The Real Anthony Fauci – a character assassination of the former head of the NIAID who oversaw the US response to the pandemic – Kennedy also sows doubt over the fact that HIV causes AIDS, while in podcast interviews he has suggested that herbicides in water may explain gender dysphoria.
It’s not only in the sphere of medicine that Kennedy has become a crackpot conspiracy theorist and purveyor of misinformation. In recent years, this onetime environmentalist has flirted with climate denial, implying that the climate crisis is merely a pretext for ‘the Davos group and other totalitarian elements in our society’ to control people, and that Democrats ‘obsess about counting CO2’. He has campaigned against offshore windfarms, lending credibility to the baseless claims by Trump and other Republicans that wind farms kill whales.
Of course, among the leading threats to many cetaceans and other marine life the world over is climate change, which is wreaking havoc on marine food webs. For many whales, changing ocean temperatures, currents and sea ice extent are changing the distribution of their prey, meaning that their migrations between calving regions and feeding grounds are often becoming longer and more treacherous.
If Kennedy and his newfound friends on the far-Right were really concerned about whale conservation, they would be campaigning not against wind farms but against lobster fisheries.
Take, for instance, the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, often the species cited by the anti-wind farm campaigners on the eastern seaboard. Once present throughout the North Atlantic, from the coasts of Florida to Greenland, Norway to North Africa, the North Atlantic right whale (NARW) was decimated by centuries of whaling and is now rarely seen in European waters. Its estimated historic population size, based on catch data for related North Pacific right whales, was between 9,000 and 22,000, although DNA evidence from other whale species strongly indicates that such catch data may dramatically underestimate actual pre-exploitation populations. The current population size of North Atlantic right whales along the East coast of North America is less than 400.
The single greatest threat to these whales is entanglement in fishing lines, of which the majority along their migration route are associated with lobster traps. The second greatest threat they face is ship strikes. Given that around 40 per cent of global shipping cargo by weight is coal, oil and natural gas, it seems all the more bizarre to be making baseless claims about supposed threats to whales from wind farms.
But, as with his medical misinformation campaigns, Kennedy seems to have little regard for data or science, preferring to amplify conspiracy theories and discredited quacks. Perhaps the degeneration of his critical thinking and embrace of misinformation are only to be expected from a man who reportedly had part of his brain eaten by a parasitic worm; it’s a better excuse than most anti-vaxxers have. Whatever the explanation, the possibility of this lunatic taking a leading role in public health or any other policy area is just one more terrifying prospect for a second Trump term.
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