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肯尼迪的庸醫聯盟想讓美國人吃下謊言
Kennedy's Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of Lies
Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 15 Nov 2024
在華盛頓，健康影響者和反對者正在試鏡，以在特朗普的白宮製度化偽科學。
小羅伯特·F·肯尼迪被許多巨大的橡皮鴨包圍。
Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 2024 年 11 月 15 日
當美國打噴嚏時，世界就會感冒。唐納德·特朗普在白宮的續任，反疫苗者羅伯特·F·肯尼迪在他耳邊低語，承諾的不僅僅是打噴嚏。它預示著疫苗可預防疾病的回歸，而這些疾病不會止步於國境。
反科學運動距離在美國宣誓就職僅剩幾個月的時間。在特朗普的空位期，一群醫學反對者和健康鬥士聚集在羅伯特·肯尼迪 (RFK Jr) 的周圍，他現在被特朗普選為即將上任的政府衛生與公眾服務部部長。雖然水晶球和塔羅牌都無法預測我們即將目睹的對公眾健康和對科學的信任的損害的範圍和程度，但對羅伯特·肯尼迪 (RFK Jr) 萌芽中的聯盟的考察揭示了一個可怕的情況。特朗普的“讓美國再次偉大”（MAGA）一再被媒體稱為“邪教”。這當然是一種個人崇拜。羅伯特·肯尼迪和他的競選團隊利用了這一口號，創造了“讓美國再次健康”或 MAHA。
肯尼迪本人應該引起人們的震驚。自 2005 年以來，他一直是現代反疫苗運動的領軍人物，當時一位心理學家將她兒子的自閉症歸咎於疫苗中的汞，並在肯尼迪家的前廊上扔了一疊聲稱存在這種聯係的文件。肯尼迪是一名熟悉汞對環境影響的環境律師，他相信這種聯係是真實的，並開始了疫苗指責運動，現在他正在將這場運動帶到華盛頓。他創立了兒童健康防禦組織，該組織的“電視頻道”助長了人們對科學和機構的恐懼和不信任，他 2019 年對薩摩亞的訪問在一定程度上導致了麻疹的爆發，導致 5,700 人患病，其中 83 人死亡。大多數死亡者都是幼兒。新西蘭向薩摩亞運送了兒童棺材，以幫助解決短缺問題。
肯尼迪惡毒的反疫苗信息現在被媒體理智地洗白，試圖提升他的聲譽，但不要誤會。他不想要“更安全的疫苗”，他根本不想要疫苗。就像中世紀城堡腳下的城牆更難防守一樣，肯尼迪在被逼迫時經常撤退到山上更安全的塔樓——土丘。在反疫苗者中，他稱針對兒童的含汞疫苗是“大屠殺”；在特朗普贏得大選後，他向 NBC 新聞表示：“我不會取消任何人的疫苗。我從來都不反對疫苗。”我不確定這是否仍然是土丘和城牆謬論，或者他現在是否在撒謊。
但肯尼迪並不孤單，因為兩個兄弟姐妹迅速被提升為肯尼迪 MAHA 運動的牧羊人：姐姐凱西和弟弟卡利·米斯。他們的書《好能量》讓他們登上了塔克·卡爾森的節目，以及一係列右翼和另類醫學播客，如《喬·羅根體驗》、《魯賓報告》和《醫生的藥房與馬克·海曼博士》。凱西隨後將媒體的關注轉化為政治黃金，將這群人聚集到華盛頓特區，參加一場由參議員羅恩·約翰遜主持的現場直播、西裝革履的偽科學劇，題為“美國健康和營養：第二種觀點”。
這次活動是一場假麵舞會，反對者披著科學的外衣，假裝是房間裏的批判性思考者。他們共同的不滿是，有人聲稱美國人正受到食物供應的毒害，導致慢性病的末日流行。大學和監管機構已成為機構控製的犧牲品：企業金錢使他們的證詞變得無可救藥地腐敗。隻有出席活動的人才值得信賴，他們能拯救美國。他們想抽幹科學沼澤，但考慮到他們與被定罪的罪犯特朗普的立場以及他們自己對科學過程的誤解，他們更有可能讓美國人陷入流沙，而不是結束腐敗。
以下是他們在拉塞爾參議院辦公大樓宣稱的一些謊言：
羅伯特·肯尼迪本人聲稱自閉症的發病率有所上升，盡管“診斷沒有變化，篩查也沒有變化”，這顯然是錯誤的：兩者都發生了眾所周知的變化。他還大膽地表示，年輕人和老年人的癌症發病率正在飆升。這根本不是正在發生的事情。
外科醫生馬蒂·馬卡裏博士於 2021 年 2 月為《華爾街日報》撰寫了一篇評論文章，題為“我們將
到 4 月實現群體免疫”，並在疫情期間不斷做出錯誤預測，聲稱“殺蟲劑正在降低我們的生育率”，盡管沒有證據表明這一點。
Casey Means 博士是這個群體的粘合劑，她在擔任頭頸外科醫生的最後一年住院醫師實習期結束後，離開了醫院，去學習功能醫學的偽科學。她表示，她在培訓中從未學到“醫療失誤和藥物是美國第三大死亡原因”。因為事實並非如此，而提出這一誤解的分析報告的共同作者正是 Marty Makary 本人。她還聲稱，醫學專業之所以存在，是因為“把人送到那裏是有利可圖的”。
她的兄弟 Calley 銷售可疑的健康產品，如膳食補充劑和紅外桑拿，他聲稱臭名昭著的 Flexner 報告的基本醫學邏輯後來被證明是錯誤的。這絕對不是事實，正如我最近所寫，但這是醫學批評者的一個流行論點，他們祈求對虛假療法采取開放政策。
為什麽他們對疾病都如此無知？有些人很難抗拒成為健康專家的願望。反體製主義和抱怨販賣，如果充斥著陰謀論，就可以在健康領域催生出一份利潤豐厚的職業，將感覺置於事實之上。這個房間裏的大多數人都準備在明年影響美國政治，他們有書要賣，有公司要受益，還有讚助協議要為他們的播客談判。
看看其中一位小組成員，瓦尼·哈裏，更廣為人知的名字是“食物寶貝”，她正在經曆職業生涯的複活。在她的化學恐懼症運動被許多科學家（包括我們辦公室的喬·施瓦茨）徹底揭穿後，她現在又回到了肯尼迪的會眾中。她譴責美國銷售的產品中含有據稱有毒的食用色素，而這些產品在其他國家顯然是被禁止的，盡管她給出的許多例子根本不是事實。
當然，她也在銷售自己的健康產品係列 Truvani，包括無氟牙膏，因為在她的圈子裏，妖魔化氟化物很流行。正如 Conspirituality 聯合主持人 Derek Beres 經常說的那樣，先看他們說什麽，再看他們賣什麽。別忘了現在就搶購你的 Make America Healthy Again 圓領羊毛運動衫！
根據 Casey Means 的說法，美國的診斷是代謝功能障礙，這是她認為所有（慢性）疾病的真正原因。據她所說，我們的細胞由於化學物質和毒素而無法再產生良好的能量。她不是代謝健康專家，聲稱找到所有疾病單一原因的理論從未成功，這些都無關緊要；這聽起來不錯。米凱拉·彼得森·富勒是臭名昭著的心理學家喬丹·彼得森的女兒，她來這裏是為了推廣她自己的靈丹妙藥：牛排和鹽，這是參議員約翰遜提出的一種荒謬的療法，被稱為“一種治療性和無植物的生酮飲食”。
這些被排斥的人不想修複這個係統；他們想把它全部燒毀，用獨角獸角做成的機構取而代之。他們被海市蜃樓所吞噬，癡迷於他們看不見的毒素和化學物質，但想象它們正在貶低我們的身體，損害我們的思想。我們正在目睹偽科學的製度化。
然而，指出這次會議的謊言和虛假，對那些沒有看過這些人的演講，沒有看到他們收到的掌聲（有時是起立鼓掌）的讀者來說是一種傷害。它忽略了他們聽起來可信的一點。超加工食品存在著真正而重要的問題。農產品通常比營養價值低得多的包裝食品更貴。許多慢性病越來越普遍，行業和政府監管之間的旋轉門是一個眾所周知的問題。這些影響者設法指出了一個重大問題，但他們過於簡單的頭腦總是錯過真正的解決方案。這與綜合醫學的營銷勝利如出一轍，綜合醫學譴責傳統醫學的缺陷，並將靈氣療法和精油等神奇思維作為解決方案。
真正的解決方案將涉及解決社會經濟不平等問題。它需要促進人們獲得醫生、執業護士、牙醫和營養師的服務。它需要降低健康食品的價格，讓身兼兩三職的人有時間烹飪營養餐。要找到解決美國飲食問題的真正良方，就需要邀請真正的專家參加這個小組。然而，麥克風後麵沒有注冊營養師、毒理學家或公共衛生專家。怎麽可能有呢？小組會認為他們是腐敗的。相反，我們看到的是像馬克斯·盧加維爾 (Max Lugavere) 這樣的人，他是一名播客，擁有電影學位
心理學博士，她的節目由一長串膳食補充劑讚助，還有 Alex Clark，一位沒有正式食品科學背景的美食寶貝，她將關於營養的古怪觀點視為她節目的“參與”。
不過，這個聯盟並沒有忘記醫生，Marty Makary 博士帶來了很大一部分資曆。Makary 是一群直言不諱的 COVID 最小化者中的一員，Jonathan Howard 博士——他認真記錄了他們的崛起——稱他們為“我們希望他們被感染”的醫生。這個名字來自特朗普第一屆政府的一名官員，他在 2020 年 7 月提出，年輕健康的人應該感染新型冠狀病毒以建立群體免疫力。幾個月後，Jay Bhattacharya 博士、Martin Kulldorff 博士和 Sunetra Gupta 教授發表了《大巴靈頓宣言》，這是朝著大規模感染邁出的又一步。目前尚不清楚有多少這些持相反觀點的醫生將被邀請為特朗普的健康計劃做出貢獻。
像約翰遜參議員的座談會和拯救共和國這樣的活動都是試鏡，在這場活動中，羅伯特·肯尼迪和他的同事們扮演了喬治·華盛頓和他的軍隊穿越特拉華河的場景。隻有一些人會入選，並在特朗普即將播出的真人秀節目中獲得決策權，直到他們不可避免地被解雇。特朗普的不可預測性和驕傲讓人很難預見這些政策中有多少會被實施，有多少會被推翻，但混亂中肯定會造成損害。
美國傳統基金會發布了一份近 1,000 頁的文件，名為“2025 項目”，旨在成為下一任美國總統的政策模板。它要求將環境問題（即氣候變化）從飲食指南中刪除；它聲稱性別認同是政治問題，來自“激進分子”；它聲稱疾病控製和預防中心 (CDC)“可能是聯邦政府中最無能和最傲慢的機構”。它推動了一項反對墮胎藥、反對青春期阻滯劑、反對疫苗和反對在 COVID-19 疫情期間戴口罩的議程。與此同時，特朗普自己的言論自由政策倡議提到了“審查卡特爾”，必須“拆除和摧毀”。它將禁止社交媒體平台審核錯誤信息，解雇敢於反擊虛假信息的聯邦雇員，並懲罰“從事審查活動”的大學。這是奧威爾式的扭曲言論自由以平息異議，甚至呼籲起訴在工作中使用“錯誤信息”和“虛假信息”標簽的人。如果我們的辦公室在美國本土，我們的生存就會受到威脅。
隨著肯尼迪和他的盟友被允許在政府最高層對衛生政策發表意見，我們將目睹整個美國醫療機構的新陳代謝功能障礙。食品安全將受到威脅，健康差距將擴大，傳染病將肆虐。然而，這並不是他們看待未來的方式。他們正忙著回顧美好的過去：身材苗條、身體健康的兒童，對生活感到滿意。他們想重現導致這種情況的情況，但他們不懂科學。在 X 上的一篇熱門帖子中，羅伯特·肯尼迪證實他全力支持偽科學。“FDA 對公共衛生的戰爭即將結束，”他寫道。“這包括對迷幻藥、肽、幹細胞、生牛奶、高壓氧療法、螯合物、伊維菌素、羥氯喹、維生素、清潔食品、陽光、運動、營養保健品以及任何其他促進人類健康且不能被製藥公司申請專利的東西的積極抑製。”我不知道 FDA 正在追查瑜伽教練。
第二次世界大戰期間，日軍和盟軍在美拉尼西亞建立了基地，美拉尼西亞是澳大利亞東北部的一組島嶼，包括巴布亞新幾內亞。許多原住民從未見過外來人，對這些士兵帶到島上的飛機、槍支和藥品感到敬畏。一些士兵假裝是美拉尼西亞人受人尊敬的祖先，也助長了對美拉尼西亞人的崇敬。戰爭結束了，“祖先”帶走了他們的貨物。
當地富有魅力的領導人隨後警告說，大災變即將來臨，隨後這些祖先將帶著他們短暫展示的財富歸來。美拉尼西亞人所要做的就是模仿他們看到士兵們進行的儀式。他們用假步槍進行演習。他們用木頭雕刻耳機並搭建控製塔。他們在臨時跑道旁點燃火把，希望飛機能夠回來。這種現象在 1945 年獲得了一個名字：貨物崇拜。
人類學家現在認識到，這種觀點可能過於簡單，掩蓋了美拉尼西亞人的一些反殖民主義情緒。但它卻被物理學家理查德·費曼在科學懷疑論圈子裏永久保留下來，他用它來指偽科學為“貨物
邪教科學。”不合理的手段被用來追求合理的目的。人們在不了解科學的核心原理和細微差別的情況下就完成了科學的程序。
如果說 MAGA 是一種邪教，那麽 MAHA 就是貨物邪教。
“讓食物成為你的藥物”是醫學之父希波克拉底的一句偽言。事實上，希波克拉底的醫生知道食物和藥物的區別。但當我們所做的隻是在虛構的跑道旁點燃火把，祈禱古代偶像和它們珍貴的貨物歸來時，誰會在乎呢？
Kennedy's Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of Lies
In Washington, wellness influencers and contrarians are auditioning to institutionalize pseudoscience in Trump’s White House.
Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 15 Nov 2024
When America sneezes, the world catches a cold. Donald Trump’s renewed tenancy in the White House, with anti-vaxxer-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr whispering in his ear, promises more than just sneezes. It heralds the return of vaccine-preventable illnesses, which do not stop at the border.
The anti-science movement is mere months away from being sworn into office in the United States. During Trump’s interregnum, a flock of medical contrarians and wellness warriors has coalesced around the figure of RFK Jr, who has now been chosen by Trump as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in his upcoming administration. While neither crystal balls nor Tarot cards can predict the scope and extent of the damage we are about to witness to public health and trust in science, an examination of RFK Jr’s budding coalition reveals a dire situation. Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) has repeatedly been called a “cult” by the media. It certainly is a cult of personality. RFK Jr and his campaign riffed on the slogan, creating Make America Healthy Again or MAHA.
Kennedy himself should inspire consternation. He has been a leading figure of the modern anti-vaccine movement since 2005, when a psychologist ascribed her son’s autism on the mercury found in vaccines and dropped a stack of papers alleging this link on Kennedy’s front porch. An environmental lawyer familiar with mercury’s effect on the environment, Kennedy believed the link was real and began his vaccine-blaming crusade, which he is now taking to Washington. He founded the Children’s Health Defense, whose “TV channel” fuels fear and mistrust of science and institutions, and his visit to Samoa in 2019 was partly responsible for an outbreak of measles, which made 5,700 people sick and killed 83 of them. Most of the deaths were in young children. New Zealand shipped children’s coffins to Samoa to help with the shortage.
Kennedy’s virulent anti-vaccine messaging is now being sanewashed in the media in an attempt to bolster his reputation, but make no mistake. He does not want “safer vaccines;” he wants no vaccines at all. Much like the bailey at the foot of a medieval castle is harder to defend, Kennedy often retreats to the safer tower on the hill—the motte—when pushed. Among anti-vaxxers, he calls mercury-containing vaccines aimed at children “a holocaust;” to NBC News, after Trump won the election, he states, “I’m not gonna take away anyone’s vaccines. I’ve never been anti-vaccine.” I’m not sure if this is still a motte-and-bailey fallacy or if he is straight up lying now.
But Kennedy is not alone, as two siblings have rapidly been promoted as the shepherds of Kennedy’s MAHA movement: sister Casey and brother Calley Means. Their book, Good Energy, got them a spot on Tucker Carlson’s show, as well as a bevy of right-wing and alternative medicine podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, The Rubin Report, and The Doctor’s Farmacy with Mark Hyman M.D. Casey then leveraged this media attention into political gold by bringing the flock together to Washington, D.C. for a live-streamed, suits-and-ties bit of pseudoscience theatre hosted by Senator Ron Johnson and entitled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.”
The event was a masquerade, with contrarians donning the garbs of science and pretending to be the critical thinkers in the room. Their shared grievance was the claim that Americans are being poisoned by their food supply, leading to an apocalyptic epidemic of chronic disease. Universities and regulatory agencies have fallen prey to institutional capture: corporate money has rendered their testimonies hopelessly corrupt. Only the people present at the event can be trusted to save America from itself. They want to drain the science swamp but given their alignment with convicted criminal Trump and their own misunderstanding of the scientific process, they are more likely to trap Americans in quicksand than to end corruption.
Here are a few of the falsehoods they proclaimed in the Russell Senate Office Building:
RFK Jr himself claimed that rates of autism have increased even though “there has been no change in diagnosis and no change in screening either,” which is patently false: both have famously changed. He also boldly stated that cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. This is not at all what is happening.
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon who wrote an opinion piece in February 2021 for the Wall Street Journal titled “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April” and who continued to make bad prediction after bad prediction during the pandemic, declared that “pesticides are driving our fertility rates down,” even though there is no evidence of this.
Dr. Casey Means, the glue of this group, who stepped away from her final year in residency as a head-and-neck surgeon to learn about the pseudoscience of functional medicine, stated that she never learned in her training that “medical error and medications are the third leading cause of death in the United States.” That is because it’s not, and the co-author of the analysis that originated this misconception is none other than Marty Makary himself. She also claimed that medical specialties exist because “it’s profitable to send people” to them.
Her brother, Calley, who sells dubious wellness products like dietary supplements and infrared saunas, claims the infamous Flexner Report’s underlying medical logic was later proven to be wrong. This is absolutely not true, as I have written about recently, but it is a popular argument among critics of medicine who pray for an open-door policy on make-believe remedies.
Why are they all so ill-informed about illness? The desire to become a health guru is hard to resist for some. Antiestablishmentarianism and grievance-mongering, when fed on a diet of conspiracy theories, can sprout a lucrative career in wellness, prioritizing feelings over facts. Most of the people in this room, who are poised to influence American politics in the next year, have books to sell, companies to benefit from, and sponsorship deals to negotiate for their podcasts. Look at one of the panelists, Vani Hari, better known as The Food Babe, who is experiencing a career resurrection. After her chemophobic crusade was soundly debunked by many scientists (including our own Office’s Joe Schwarcz), she is now back as part of Kennedy’s congregation. She denounces the presence of allegedly toxic food dyes in products sold in the U.S. which are apparently banned in other countries, even though many of the examples she gives are simply not true. She is, of course, selling her own line of health products called Truvani, including fluoride-free toothpaste, because demonizing fluoride is popular in her circles. As Conspirituality co-host Derek Beres often says, watch what they say, then watch what they sell. And don’t forget to snag your Make America Healthy Again crewneck fleece sweatshirt now!
America’s diagnosis, according to Casey Means, is metabolic dysfunction, her one true cause of all (chronic) diseases. According to her, our cells can’t produce good energy anymore because of chemicals and toxins. It doesn’t matter that she is not a metabolic health expert or that theories claiming to have found a single cause for all diseases never pan out; it sounds good. Mikhaila Peterson Fuller, daughter of infamous psychologist Jordan Peterson, was there to promote her own would-be panacea: steak and salt, a ludicrous regimen introduced by Senator Johnson as “a therapeutic and plant-free ketogenic diet.”
These outcasts don’t want to fix the system; they want to burn it all down and replace it with institutions made of unicorn horns. They have become consumed with mirages, obsessed with toxins and chemicals they cannot see but imagine are debasing our bodies and impairing our minds. We are witnessing the institutionalization of pseudoscience.
Pointing out the lies and falsehoods of this meeting, however, does a disservice to the reader who has not watched these people’s speeches and seen the applause (and sometimes standing ovations) they received. It misses the point that they sound credible. There are real and important problems surrounding ultra-processed food. Produce is often more expensive than packaged items that are far less nutritious. Many chronic diseases are getting more common, and the revolving door between industry and government regulation is a well-known issue. These influencers have managed to put their finger on a significant problem, but their simplistic minds keep missing the real solution. This echoes the marketing victory of integrative medicine, which denounces failings of conventional medicine and spotlights magical thinking in the form of Reiki and essential oils as a solution.
Real solutions would involve addressing socioeconomic inequalities. It would require facilitating access to doctors, nurse practitioners, dentists, and dietitians. It would necessitate the price of healthy food to go down, and for people who hold two or three jobs to somehow find the time to cook nourishing meals. To arrive at a real prescription for America’s dietary woes would have required inviting actual experts to this panel. Behind the microphones, however, there were no registered dietitians, no toxicologists, no public health experts. How could there be? The panel would view them as corrupt. Instead, we were presented with folks like Max Lugavere, a podcaster with a degree in film and psychology whose show is sponsored by a long list of dietary supplements, and Alex Clark, a Food Babe in the making with no formal background in food science who sees crank opinions about nutrition as “engagement” for her show.
Medical doctors have not been forgotten in this coalition, though, with Dr. Marty Makary bringing in a large share of those credentials. Makary is part of a vocal group of COVID minimizers, who are referred to by Dr. Jonathan Howard—who has conscientiously documented their rise—as the We Want Them Infected doctors. The name comes from an official in the first Trump administration who, in July 2020, proposed that young and healthy people should be infected by the novel coronavirus to build herd immunity. Months later, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Prof. Sunetra Gupta released the Great Barrington Declaration, another step in the direction of mass infections. It is unknown at this point how many of these contrarian doctors will be invited to contribute to Trump’s health plan. Events like Senator Johnson’s panel and Rescue the Republic, which portrayed RFK Jr and his associates as George Washington and his army crossing the Delaware, are auditions. Only some will make the cut and be given the power to make decisions in Trump’s upcoming reality TV show, until they are inevitably fired. Trump’s unpredictability and pride make it hard to foresee how many of these policy ideas will be enacted and how many will be rolled back, but there will be damage in the chaos.
The Heritage Foundation released a nearly-1,000-page document called “Project 2025” which aims to be a policy template for the next U.S. president. It demands that environmental concerns (read: climate change) be removed from dietary guidelines; it claims that gender identity is political and comes from “radical actors;” and it asserts that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” It pushes forward an agenda that is anti-abortion-pills, anti-puberty-blockers, and anti-vaccine and anti-mask in the case of COVID-19. Meanwhile, Trump’s own Free Speech Policy Initiative speaks of the “censorship cartel,” which must be “dismantled and destroyed.” It will ban social media platforms from moderating misinformation, fire federal employees who dared push back against falsehoods, and punish universities who have “engaged in censorship activities.” This is the Orwellian warping of free speech to quell dissent, going so far as to call for the prosecution of people who have used the labels “misinformation” and “disinformation” in their work. If our Office were on American soil, our very existence would be jeopardized.
With Kennedy and his allies being allowed to weigh in on health policy at the highest level of government, we will witness the metabolic dysfunction of the entire American healthcare apparatus. Food safety will be endangered, health disparities will increase, and infectious diseases will rage on. That is not how they see the future, though. They are busy looking in the rearview mirror at a rose-tinted past: trim and fit children, happy with life. They want to recreate the circumstances that led to this, but they don’t understand science. In a viral post on X, RFK Jr confirmed he is all-in on pseudoscience. “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” I wasn’t aware the FDA was going after yoga instructors.
During the Second World War, Japanese troops followed by Allied forces established bases in Melanesia, a group of islands northeast of Australia which includes Papua New Guinea. Many of their Indigenous peoples had never met outsiders and were awed by the planes, guns, and medicines these soldiers brought to their islands. Veneration was also helped by some soldiers pretending to be revered ancestors of Melanesians. The war ended, and the “ancestors” took their cargo with them.
Charismatic local leaders then warned of a cataclysm, followed by the return of these ancestors bringing back the wealth they had briefly displayed. All Melanesians had to do was mimic the rituals they had seen the soldiers engage in. They practiced drills with fake rifles. They carved headphones out of wood and erected control towers. They lit torches alongside makeshift runways, hoping the planes would return. This phenomenon earned a name in 1945: cargo cult.
Anthropologists now recognize that this view may have been simplistic and obscured some of the Melanesians’ anti-colonialist sentiment. But it became immortalized in scientific skepticism circles by physicist Richard Feynman, who used it to refer to pseudoscience as “cargo cult science.” Irrational means are used to pursue rational ends. People go through the motions of science without understanding its core principles and nuances.
If MAGA is a cult, then MAHA is a cargo cult.
“Let food be thy medicine” is an apocryphal quote attributed to Hippocrates, the father of medicine. In reality, Hippocratic doctors knew the difference between food and medicines. But who cares when all we’re doing is lighting torches alongside make-believe runways and praying for the return of ancient idols and their precious cargo?
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