RFK Jr.’s Toxic World
The Bulwark · C · trust 36/100
The HHS secretary uses fear of contamination to denigrate modern medicine and advance a project rooted in vulgar eugenics.
Alan Elrod August 25 Upgrade to listen 15 minutes 9 4 (Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) IN TODD HAYNES’S 1995 FILM SAFE , housewife Carol (Julianne Moore) is beset by mysterious, undiagnosable ailments that push her from a life of suburban alienation in her empty Los Angeles mansion into one of complete physical isolation at a New Age wellness camp in the desert. She gets there with the help of impersonal medical professionals, 1980s wellness psychobabble, and her own growing fear that the entire modern world around her is menacingly, inescapably toxic.
Her arc is tragic; it culminates with her standing alone in front of a mirror in an isolation hut on the wellness compound grounds. With lesions visible on her pallid face, she says “I love you” to her reflection, repeating it over and over. She has by this point been fully severed from both society around her and, more crucially, herself. Watching the film for the first time this summer, I was struck by the movie’s prefiguring of parts of the contemporary MAHA movement. But I also saw a reflection of some of my own struggles with mental health.
Carol’s decline offers a picture of the world that helped to give us our current health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The same wealthy, alienated milieu of Southern California of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries provided a setting for Kennedy to make his transition from middling failson of Camelot to sleazy environmental lawyer to the mendacious quack we know today—one who wants people to believe that the entire world is menacingly, inescapably toxic.
Kennedy’s environmental law work began as a vehicle for community service ordered by a judge following a drug arrest. He carried that out as a volunteer at the Natural Resources Defense Council (an organization that has since publicly repudiated him) and worked to clean up the Hudson River, beginning a phase of his career that lasted for several decades. By the late 2000s, Kennedy was in Los Angeles and undergoing the final stage of his transformation into the man familiar to us today. He joined Children’s Health Defense and began giving talks about how, after they receive a vaccination, “children go to sleep, and three months later, their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.” 1
In addition to its evocation of Kennedy’s paranoid California, Carol’s story also left me with something more personal—a painful moment of self-recognition. I cannot remember when I first exhibited the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the health condition that has shaped my adolescence and early adult life. I can recall, even in my earliest days, a vague sense of needing to separate the “dirty” from the “clean.” Later, as a young member of the dry, legalistic evangelical denomination of the churches of Christ, I fixated on sin—its omnipresence and its seeming irremovability. Fears of alcohol poisoning and heavy metals followed, but the theme was always the same: The world around me was dangerously contaminated, and I had to do everything in my power to remain unpolluted. At times, this pursuit drove me to the edge of insanity. It even became a risk to my life.
A diagnosis in my late twenties—some two decades after I started experiencing symptoms, a typical pattern for OCD sufferers—made sense out of my experiences and helped me to recognize that my own disordered thinking posed a greater risk than the threats I fixated on in the world around me. So, watching Carol, I felt a sense of identification with her.
Importantly, concerns such as Carol’s—or mine, amplified as they are by my condition—aren’t always wholly baseless. It’s true that we did spend much of the twentieth century pumping leaded gas into the atmosphere, choking our rivers with toxic sludge, and manufacturing consumer products that sometimes turned out to be hazardous. But that doesn’t mean those concerns take a rational form. Carol’s fears, for example, are more vague and less scientific. It’s “chemicals,” she repeatedly says, that are causing her infirmity. After her doctors express bewilderment at her illness, one for which they cannot seem to find any diagnostic evidence, she seeks out the ministrations of dubious “wellness” professionals who are far less scrupulous about what they are willing to diagnose, and what treatments they are willing to prescribe.
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Haynes has said that Safe is meant in part as a critique of the kind of self love–focused wellness advice that for a time was offered to everyone from HIV/AIDS sufferers to anorexics like Karen Carpenter; the message they received was that they alone were responsible for their recovery and survival. Only by embracing and empowering themselves could they beat their affliction, no matter its specific character. As Haynes said in an interview with BFI,
Peter’s [the wellness center leader’s] cure is to adhere completely to these very basic ideas about self that affirm the society as it is. His kind of New Age philosophy comes out of a 60s ideology, using Eastern traditions to re-examine the West. It claims to change the world through self-esteem or a softening of basic structures of resistance, but I see it as a reiteration of basic conservative arguments about the self, which are closely aligned with masculinity and patriarchy.
Eugenics looms here, as well. If the method of salvation is embracing self-actualization, then saving yourself is a choice. If you fail, you are culpable for the failure; those who make it—who survive, who overcome, who get better—deserve it. This is a…
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