I don’t mean to be that guy, but someone has to. Someone has to say things are not getting better, no matter how low Donald Trump’s polling numbers go, no matter how stupid his birthday parade was, no matter how many people (4-6 million) protested against him last weekend.
We want things to get better, because we want to believe America is better than this. But America really isn’t better than this. The last election proved it. The next election won’t change it. If we do not face the truth about the people, I don’t see how we can make things right.
The denial is so deep that leaders of the Democratic Party still can’t bring themselves to blame the president, even when he’s directly responsible for inspiring an assassin to murder one of their own.
I mean, Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, was close friends with Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota lawmaker who was gunned down in cold blood. Martin wept for her on national TV but didn’t name Trump. He should have said, “That’s it, no more Mr. Nice Democrat.” Instead, he meekly asked why we can’t all get along.
But the denial goes deeper. As liberals cheer the fact that Trump’s job approval is sliding downward, even on issues that favor him, such as immigration, the president acts like there’s no such thing as polling, and like there’s no such thing as a public that he’s obliged to serve.
Instead, he comes out and says he will use federal law to punish his enemies and reward his friends, pulling back immigration enforcement in red states while ramping it up in blue ones. As anti-Trump conservative Joe Walsh said this morning, the “ugly plan” is to “incite violence in blue cities and blue states only, and then put the military on the streets in those blue cities and blue states only. Everything he does is meant to divide us. He is the absolute worst of us.”
Kevin Kruse called the chaos and violence intentional, yet from the way liberals and Democrats respond to it, you’d think there’s no harm being done that cannot be undone by the next election, namely when the Democrats take back the House next year. After all, just look at Trump’s polling, we are told by MSNBC pundits, as if any of this chaos and violence has anything to do with normal democratic politics.
If anything, the fear, ignorance and superstition that led to Trump’s second takeover of the US government is getting worse. It’s going viral. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dissolved the CDC vaccine advisory committee and is now stocking it with kooks and loons. He’s turning the Department of Health and Human Services into the world's biggest disinfo organ and lots of people are going to die as a result, no matter who’s elected next time.
Kennedy is probably the most dangerous man in the government right now, but don’t take my word for it. Take it from Gabrielle A. Perry, an epidemiologist, writer and philanthropist who’s been sounding the alarm on how really bad things are really going to get.
She told me that anyone who thinks Trump is losing is “as delusional as his supporters are, especially when it comes to the scientific impact of this. Anyone who is truly familiar with cults understand what is happening. You can defeat a man but it is much harder to defeat an idea.”
JS: The government is becoming the biggest disinfo machine, with Health and Human Services ordering bogus studies on the impact of vaccines on autism. What does this look like from your view?
GP: For all the faults of our government — past, present and future — I never thought I would be alive to see the day where we as a country willfully allowed the proliferation of anti-science ideology to infiltrate real-world policy.
We've always been inundated with pseudoscience. We see it in the wellness industry and the proliferation of tonics, supplements, diets and cure-alls for every ailment under the sun, from acne to cancer. People have every right to pursue their health in their own way. But to see the banning of research, the banning of scientifically backed public health measures, the criminalization of public health, the banning of mifepristone (which is used for procedures well beyond abortion) — it's to the point that now, in my work as an epidemiologist, we are having meetings to discuss ways to penetrate this cult of personality that is leading to the deaths of people, especially children, from diseases we once eliminated.
Which is proving to be an arduous task for my colleagues, as field epidemiology, case management and clinicians are seeing the rise of antagonistic feelings toward the medical and public health sphere. People seem to believe that medicine will make up for the dismantling of our public health sphere. We saw that during COVID as well, with many begging for the COVID vaccine (a preventative measure) after already contracting the disease and suffering adverse health ailments. Seeing the dismantling of American public health is terrifying, because we in the field know that the medicinal field cannot make up for what is to come, which is a massive strain on our healthcare infrastructure.
Tell me more about what's to come. How bad is healthcare in America going to get?
Despite the general public's apathy towards the dismantling of our healthcare system, even in light of COVID, the lack of vaccine uptake, the lack of availability of healthcare providers — especially as there is now a 750 percent increase in doctors moving to Canada to flee the tyranny upon their field — and the dismantling of Medicaid (which is the backbone of our health-care infrastructure), people will become sicker and sicker. This is not hard to imagine, as we are already living it. Twenty-five years ago, measles was eliminated in the U.S. Now it is decimating west Texas.
And if allowed to continue on this path, especially since it causes immune amnesia, we will continue to see elevated levels of sickness and death in children. The thing people don't understand is that for every bed in a hospital given to a person suffering from an acute, preventable illness, that removes a bed for the cancer patient, the grandmother suffering from a heart attack, the kid with the dog bite, the brother needing an open operating room for surgery.
There are not only a finite number of beds, but those beds are about to shrink in number once Medicaid is cut off at the knees. Hospitals are nonprofits. Their funds come from grants from the federal government in the form of Medicaid. Those same cuts are also going to exacerbate the current physician and nurse shortage we are having nationwide, since Medicaid is the primary funder of residency programs in the nation. Combine a lack of healthcare professionals, an overloaded healthcare system, and rampant pseudoscientific beliefs, it creates a perfect storm for the collapse of this system
There are many liberals who argue that Trump is actually losing — in the courts, in the polls, even on Wall Street. From what you're telling me, though, I gather that fear and superstition are spreading like a virus, and that talk of Trump losing is premature, to say the least.
It's delusional. They are as delusional as his supporters are, especially when it comes to the scientific impact of this. Anyone who is truly familiar with cults understands what is happening. You can defeat a man but it is much harder to defeat an idea. The president appeals to the baser instincts of a society that has already long been bred to be individualistic. And hyper-individualism is malleable. It is able to see anything happen to someone else and simply be grateful that it is not (yet) you. This man will die one day. But his ideologies will live on, because there has been no meaningful pushback. Even with the courts. If there had been, he would not even be president.
The beautiful thing about the constitution is that it is a living breathing document, but it is as useful as toilet paper in the face of tyranny. The new administration is using that document to rain down tyranny on American citizens, which should make people question the validity of the system we have and the way it operates. But that would require what many don't have: imagination. Believing beyond your current circumstances is how my ancestors and many more built the current world we live in, one they knew they would likely never see. We have long enjoyed the fruits of so many others' labor. And to get past this moment in history, it will take more than just one more vote and a general apathy. It will take imagination.
The regime appears to be setting us up for another pandemic. That's what seems like, given Kennedy's orders on the COVID vaccine and most recently, a potential bird flu vaccine. How do you see it?
Well, first, the COVID pandemic never ended. And second, the new administration is setting the American people up for many things. In times of panic and political instability, chaos allows tyranny to grow even more powerful. This has been studied. The Nazis used the fear and trepidation in the wake of the Spanish flu to rise to power by sowing fear, anti-immigrant sentiments, and more societally.
And when it comes to science, four years is a lifetime.
To not have true eyes on the mutations happening, to have an administration being willing to lie to the American people, to have a public willing to set the world on fire as long as the people they have been taught to hate suffer more? Give measles four years to proliferate wildly with no meaningful Epidemic Intelligence Service or public health pushback, we'll never outrun it.