Not The Cheeseburgers!

No.237: November 15, 2024

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

Apparently David Bahnsen and I both woke up in BizarroWorld. He wrote to express his puzzlement here. Here is where I take my opportunity. I am greeted with the spectacle of self-styled “conservative” Republicans and evangelicals and pro-lifers positively giddy with excitement over the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to oversee the Department of Health & Human Services.

For the eleventy-billionth time, populism is corrupting. You jump and dance and cheer at anything your “team” does and before you know it you have abandoned every pretense of moral principle. Matt Gaetz? Yeah, he’s probably a reprobate low-life who sleeps with and traffics underage girls, but he’ll sure sock it to the establishment! Hooray! Tulsi Gabbard represented the interests of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad after he gassed a bunch of his people, sure. But, hey, look! John Bolton is angry, so she must be great! Hooray!

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a lunatic. A full-throated purveyor of conspiracy theories. “They,” you see, are out to kill you. “Big” Pharma, “Big” Agriculture, “Big” Soda, “Big” Candy Bar—they are stone-cold killers trying to slowly poison us all to death. He has spent his career insinuating that parents of autistic children are to blame, spinning the thoroughly false narrative that childhood vaccines are autism’s cause (Note: if you send me a link to some HTML website with neon green font headings saying otherwise, I will ban you—been there, done that). He told us that COVID was specifically manufactured so that it doesn’t affect Chinese people or Ashkenazi Jews. The guy is a complete nut job.

He is also a big believer in abortion, having publicly supported the procedure up to “full term.” It so happens that HHS Director is the one office that most affects Federal abortion policy. He’ll have a big say in the regulatory regime. And the pro-lifers all go, “Hooray”? As I say, BizarroWorld.

Oh, he’s also a Kennedy, which means there always seems to be a major asterisk when it comes to moral character. I know that most people have long since stopped caring about moral character—or at least are accustomed to giving people named Kennedy a pass—but surely even they have to cringe when they discover that Mr. Kennedy, Jr. kept a detailed diary of his 37 extramarital affairs, all “coded” according to specific levels of sexual deviancy, and when his wife found it and read it she committed suicide. Give that guy a cabinet position!

I will not take the time to tackle the psychology of conspiracy theories, so I will just recommend to you Jonathan Kay’s book, Among The Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground. It’s a good eye-opener, and does a great job outlining the psychology and thought-processes involved. It is a religious worldview that shares much in common with ancient pagan Manichaean and Gnostic cults. One is initiated into the “secret” knowledge of what’s “really” going on, which feeds the ego and breeds contempt for the ignorant “sheeple” who don’t know any better. It is misanthropic and soul-corrupting in the extreme.

But this is the guy who is going to “Make America Healthy Again.” MAHA, they call it; apparently it’s just a dedicated arm of the MAGA movement. The target? Here’s how Mr. Trump himself explains it: