Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a former lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council and was once a pillar of the Democratic Party, which is why President Obama floated his name to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
He now controls the agency that controls the EPA. This is a big victory for anti-science progressives. And since they play chess, not checkers, anti-science Republicans think it’s their idea.
It seems like a century ago, but it was actually just a few years ago that Democrats wanted to ban GMOs, processed foods, and vaccines. And he stated that all chemicals cause cancer, without using science, only epidemiology. Now one of their own is doing it and Republicans are applauding him. All it took was for another former Democrat, President Donald Trump, to legitimize Kennedy in a way that President Obama, who was on the same page with Kennedy on the link between vaccines and autism when he was elected, considered too risky.
President Biden was the worst executive in charge of science since Nixon, until this year. Trump, a perfectly sensible president in his first term, returned for a second chance to govern and inflicted a self-inflicted intellectual bullet wound on Kennedy. Last December it was incomprehensible that Trump could be worse for science than Biden. The assumption among literate people was that Trump would do what Obama did in 2008 and tell Kennedy “sorry, I tried, you don’t have the votes” and give a billion dollars to one of Kennedy’s companies (1) and then continue the many positive things he did from 2017 to 2020.
He didn’t and so far he’s even worse than Biden. And Biden tried to declare that an artificial pond on a farm was navigable water of the United States and in case an aircraft carrier had to park there, armed and masked federal marshals had to be able to terrorize farmers who happened to be Republicans by making surprise visits.
Kennedy is worse.
Biden told the EPA to go to court and ask, bizarrely, to overturn its own ruling on trace chemicals in the environment and come to a new agreement with himself that science was going to take a backseat to the epidemiology delivered to the EPA by the Services. Banning science would be easy when the 90% of Democrats who dominate services like Fish and Wildlife could give the EPA their own survey data claiming that a herbicide is turning frogs gay, and the EPA could ban it. No evaluation or conference is needed.
Kennedy is worse.
Yesterday he gave all his friends on the left a giant bag of money; without using science, only epidemiological statements, caused the EPA to designate PFOA and PFOS as “hazardous substances” under the Superfund law.
Let’s be clear: for environmental lawyers in prestigious positions, “accountability” always and exclusively refers to financing their lifestyles. This is a demand gift to Kennedy’s friends and will make the Big Tobacco deal look silly.
Because science knows what Kennedy doesn’t know; PFAS alone are 12,000 chemicals, almost all of them natural. None of them have ever caused so much as a headache in a clinical trial. His abuse of the executive order does not distinguish between natural and synthetic PFAS, all it does is allow trial lawyers who can detect them near a DuPont plant to file a lawsuit, even if there is no evidence of any harm.
They’re not going to vote for a Republican just yet, but the Democratic Party’s most eccentric activists are delighted that one of their own has entered the Republican brains.
But it is terrible for the United States.
(1) President Obama made things better by giving Kennedy’s BrightSource, with just $17 million in revenue, $1.4 billion of his money.
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