'The cognitive dissonance is frightening': How Trump controls his supporters

As I was editing the following interview with Charles Gaba, founder of ACAsignups.com, I was reminded of something Will Stancil told me during my chat with him. Will said: “I think people are used to living in a relatively stable era and have come to believe that stability is normal."

Will was talking about the dominant interpretation of political history among liberals. For most of us, the battles of the past settled the biggest arguments, and from those settlements arose a period of relative peace and stability that nearly all of us take for granted.

Will said: “Liberals have trained themselves to see the world through this very particular end-of-history lens, where the ‘stuff that matters’ is inevitably wonky policy questions, the day-to-day of taxes and government, who gets subsidies, what healthcare policy looks like.

“But it’s ridiculous. History isn’t over, the future will contain events as dramatic and horrible as the events of the past, and this stuff is just what it looks like: an assault on the foundations of our government, with all the terrifying and weighty implications that it seems to have.”

Complicating this is the concept of American exceptionalism, which is to say, the idea that America is the exception to the rule of the world. In most of the nations in global history, might has made right. The law was never applied equally, or universally. It has usually been just another tool of political elites to maintain their preferred status quo.

But liberals don’t want to believe that about America, even when they acknowledge that the country often falls short of its stated ideals. We tell ourselves that whatever tyranny we face is a temporary setback to the inevitability of America's soul being revealed once and for all.

Because of this faith, most liberals, but not only liberals, can’t imagine a future in which the government is trying to hurt them. We say that that only happens in times like the early 20th century, in places like Soviet Russia or Maoist China. There are no gulags here, we say. The government can’t possibly seek to inflict mass suffering and death.

We have to change this mindset. America is just like any other country. It’s not that special. We can love it, flaws and all, even when it’s not the exception to the rule of the world. The battles of the past century have not settled the biggest arguments. Social instability arising from insane public policies will almost certainly become the new norm. And the government can, as it seems to be doing now, try to kill the sickest 5 percent of the population to create conditions for controlling the rest.

In the dark disturbing interview with Charles Gaba that follows, the specter of social Darwinism lurks in the background. The unstated belief behind every policy decided by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “the survival of the fittest,” in which the strong should rule and the weak should die.

“Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘MAHA’ goal,” Charles said.

JS: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to change the way children are given vaccines. First, is there a problem with the status quo? What are they looking for that we don't know about, if anything?

CG: To the best of my knowledge there aren't any issues with the status quo beyond some states being far too lenient on vaccination requirements (religious objections, etc). My view is that the sole exceptions should be people who have legitimate medical conditions, which make them unable to take a particular vaccine.

The argument seems to be that children are being over-vaccinated as a way of padding drug companies pockets with unnecessary vaccinations. The claim seems to be that children are extremely unlikely to die from or to be seriously harmed by COVID, for instance, and therefore, it's unnecessary to vaccinate them — except that even if true, they can still be carriers who infect higher-risk adults, and so on.

It seems like this is what happens when conspiracy theory finds traction in public health policy. Is that right and why?

Absolutely. The most recent anti-vax movement (sparked by [British fraudster] Andrew Wakefield and popularized by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy) started out as more of a left-leaning thing via "granola mom" types (I believe Marin County, California, is considered the "birthplace" of that resurgence) in the late 1990ss and early 2000s.

I think — and again, I'm not an expert on this — it began gaining major traction among Republicans during the 2016 primary when Donald Trump told a vague anti-vax story about a supposedly non-autistic child who "became" autistic after getting vaccinated.

And of course this thinking went into overdrive among MAGA Republicans during the COVID pandemic, even though it was the administration of their own lord and savior, Donald Trump that helped develop the very mRNA vaccines they were protesting against.

Since then it's gotten so far out of control that Republican lawmakers in several deep-red states — including Iowa, Montana and Idaho — have actually introduced legislation that would ban mRNA vaccines!

The cognitive dissonance is frightening.

So conspiracy theories are being used to rationalize political outcomes? If so, one of the outcomes is death. Getting rid of people is a rightwing goal, historically. We can say that reasonably, no?

Vaccine specialist and science communicator Edward Nirenberg put it best: "If I were HHS secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken."

In this particular instance he was referring to the announcement that RFK Jr. is withdrawing US funding from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), but he could be talking about any number of other policy changes RFK Jr. has made already.

I don't know if it's a "rightwing" goal generally, but it sure as hell seems to be the goal of the Trump administration and MAGA Republicans.

When RFK Jr. rolled out his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign, the assumption was that he intended to make existing Americans healthy. Instead, everything he, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his "MAHA" goal.

Call it Operation Nietzsche, I suppose.

I've written several explainers about the goals of the Affordable Care Act and how health insurance risk pools work, which involve this concept: Generally speaking, around 5 percent of a given large population tends to eat up around 50 percent of all medical spending.

Kennedy’s and the administration’s "logic," therefore, seems to be that if you simply killed off the sickest 5 percent of the population, healthcare costs for the remaining 95 percent would be cut in half.

This is obviously immoral and appalling, but it also seems to be the driving force behind many of their decisions.

It sounds like social Darwinism has been restored in popularity. I mean, even MAGAs, who will themselves be killed by such policies, will nevertheless support them if they also kill people who are "undeserving." It's like a suicide cult that few can see.

This is a trend that folks like Jonathan Metzl (one of his books is literally titled Dying of Whiteness) have been talking about for years, and which I analyzed extensively during the covid pandemic.

I found a direct and steep correlation between Trump support and COVID death rates as well as a direct inverse correlation between Trump support and vaccination rates at the county level.

Lyndon Johnson famously put it best:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

Another goal of rightwing politics is social control. Kennedy came close to saying that when he said this week his goal is everyone wearing "wearables" in four years. How is this even debatable?

The irony goes through the roof. One of the biggest and most absurd conspiracy theories among the MAGA anti-vax crowd regarding COVID vaccines was that they supposedly included tiny "microchips" that would "magnetize" you, and allow Bill Gates to track your every move etc. (Of course, the fact that everyone carrying smartphones around these days pretty much allows various companies to do exactly that already was apparently lost on them).

Yet many of the same crowd gush over Elon Musk's companies, including Neuralink, which literally implants microchips into the human brain, and Tesla, which can literally track the location of their cars (so can most other carmakers to some extent these days).

And now you have RFK Jr. pushing for "everyone" to wear small devices on their bodies that allow private companies and/or potentially the federal government to track not only your every move but your most private medical and health data via biometrics, etc.

Meanwhile, Republicans in some states like Virginia have introduced bills to track women’s menstrual cycles, something which Vice President JD Vance was a proponent of as recently as 2023.