Today’s lesson of Bossi’s Finishing School for difficult women teaches you how to respond when RFK Jr’s brainworm decides to take an interview on CNN.
[Insert clip of RFK Jr and Dana Bash CNN Interview]
When RFK Jr. insists that ICU’s were empty all over the country at the height of COVID, including in New York, cock your head and say,
Sir, just because you have a brain worm that’s eaten away your memory doesn’t mean the rest of us do. We remember the field hospital in Central Park and refrigerated trucks with dead bodies. We remember overwhelmed ERs, ventilator shortages, and doctors rationing care according to who was most likely to survive.
And above all, we remember the marmalade menace who looked at all of that horror and suggested injecting disinfectant.
When he insists that the US had the highest number of COVID deaths in the world despite our lockdown policies, channel your calmest Dana Bash voice and say:
Robert, you may not understand this because you’re not a serious person, but there is a difference between total deaths and deaths per capita. The US actually ranked around 14th.
And perhaps we would have done better if Republicans hadn’t spent months politicizing the virus, calling it a hoax and turning the simple request to wear a mask into a reality-TV version of American Psycho: Your Neighbor Next Door.
When he becomes irate, dismisses decades of vaccine research and announces that RSV is the biggest killer of children in America, speak louder and say:
Listen, you haunted Furby. Just because you shout it, doesn’t make it true. But since you seem to think it does, let me inform you that over 40 studies involving nearly 6 million people have found no link between vaccines and autism, plus one major independent review concluded that you should kiss my ass.
Oh and the leading cause of death for children in the US is actually firearms.
Remember, ladies and gents: authoritarian movements do not only lie about the present. They rewrite the past, sow doubt about what you saw with your own eyes, discredit anyone capable of contradicting them and replace scientific evidence with whatever story keeps them in power.
Fortunately, Difficult Women recognize absolute bullshit when we see it.
Class dismissed. C.U.Next.Thursday.
If you have not watched RFK Jr.’s full CNN interview with Dana Bash, I encourage you to do so. It is infuriating, but it is also highly informative. I have included it above because it offers a disturbing window into the beliefs shaping health policy under this administration.
RFK Jr. is not merely an eccentric man shouting conspiracy theories into a podcast microphone. He is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
That position holds enormous weight. HHS oversees agencies responsible for public health, medical research, food and drug safety, Medicare and Medicaid. In this role, Kennedy helps shape not only health policy, but the information our government presents to the public as truth.
Authoritarian movements have always understood that controlling people requires controlling the stories they believe.
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