RKF Jr Is a Symptom No Matter How Much He Looks Like the Problem

Over the course of this work, I’ve written about how White Christian Nationalists view science and medicine. On 20 May 2024, I wrote the newsletter Science and the Christian Nationalist to warn Americans about what undergirded various Project 2025 objectives:

I wrote about how they would destroy the National Institutes of Health (19 March 2024):

And how they would gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (14 February 2024):

And how they would decimate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (20 March 2024):

And so much more. Readers can type various science and health-related topics in the search bar (the magnifying glass on the upper-right of most screens), and they will find loads of newsletters. They weren’t prescient. I read Project 2025 and understood what I was reading, because I came from the world that made it.

Imagine you grew up in a holler. Poor. Eight people lived in your two-room house with a dirt floor. You bathed once a week in family order; everyone used the same water, meaning it was filthy by the time it was your turn. The outhouse was a board with a hole cut in it spanning a creek where you swam.

Maybe the midwife made it to your house to deliver your younger siblings, but doctors were rare. You didn’t see a dentist until you were an adult and barely saw any other kind of healthcare professional. Your mom and your aunts taught you how to make elixirs and potions and poultices. If those didn’t work, it was because you did something to make God mad and needed to suffer.

Or imagine you grew up in a different part of Appalachia. Your mom was damaged from her last midwife-delivered pregnancy and was told she couldn’t have more children. Yet somehow, she delivered you in a midwife’s office one level up from the drugstore where two men launched the plot that became the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Your family wasn’t especially religious since your dad was always drunk and screwing around on your mom, but the very rural nature of your existence meant you didn’t see doctors much. Healthcare was more trying to avoid getting sick or hurt than it was listening to experts. You didn’t really have a good physical until you enlisted in the Army. For the rest of your life, you’d only listen to healthcare workers at the VA, and only when their advice didn’t conflict with your religious beliefs.

These stories may sound quaint and way-back, but in many parts of the rural United States, they still happen today. They were happening while researchers were making leaps in labs and medical trials turned into treatments and human beings recovered from ailments that previously killed them.

A big swath of the United States stayed stuck in simpler times. They were always suspicious of strangers smart people city folk experts, no matter how outwardly friendly they seemed at first.

And now many of those people control our access to science and medicine.

Tomorrow, we’ll dig into one of the manifestos that undergird this movement. But today I want everyone to understand that changing our future reality means tackling so much more bad programming than even I realized when I wrote the 2024 newsletters linked today.

For the sake of future humanity, we must do that work.