MAHA People Are Mad At RFK Jr. And For Good Reason As He Reverses Stance On Glyphosate
from the about-face dept
One of the more perplexing questions in all of the coverage I’ve done on RFK Jr. has been whether or not Kennedy is some misguided true believer or if this is all some grift for power, influence, and/or money. While most people who watch how RFK Jr. has operated on the topic of vaccines, for instance, both before and after he entered government, they assume he’s a real, if stupid, crusader. But they will tell you the same when it comes to processed foods and pesticides, two topics on which Kennedy has also crusaded for years, and two topics that have been noticeably absent or reversed now that he’s in government.
The pesticide topic was recently thrust back into the news. Trump signed an executive order that essentially demanded that two chemicals be produced in higher quantities: phosphorus and glyphosate. Kennedy then came out to cheerlead the executive order as well, which was odd when you consider what glyphosate is chiefly used for.
Trump on Wednesday night signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to compel the domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides. Glyphosate is the chemical in Bayer-Monsanto’s Roundup and is the most commonly used herbicide for a slew of U.S. crops. Trump, in the order, said shortages of both phosphorus and glyphosate would pose a risk to national security.
Kennedy backed the president in a statement to CNBC Thursday morning.
“Donald Trump’s Executive Order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply,” he said. “We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it. When hostile actors control critical inputs, they weaken our security. By expanding domestic production, we close that gap and protect American families.”
Bayer-Monsanto has been the defendant in a number of lawsuits over its Roundup product. Specifically, those suits have been powered by claims that glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer primarily impacting blood cells. Whether or not you or I think those claims are true, Kennedy sure said he did, since he acted as counsel in some of these suits.
Kennedy, a former environmental attorney, notably once won a nearly $290 million case against Monsanto for a man who claimed his cancer was caused by Roundup. The executive order came down one day after Bayer proposed paying $7.25 billion to settle a series of lawsuits claiming Roundup causes cancer.
The MAHA crowd is understandably pissed. Building a career on these very concrete health stances, only to reverse course while in government to appease Dear Leader, is a fairly horrible look. And it’s actually a worst of both worlds situation, as his MAHA crowd is pointing to his failed promises and hypocrisy, while those who are generally his opponents are pointing out that this might be a stance in which he was actually acting rationally before pulling a u-turn.
“This was one of the few issues where Secretary Kennedy actually embraced credible science,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “But RFK Jr. tossed out his years of anti-pesticide advocacy and conviction like a used tissue to stay in the good graces of Donald Trump, who cares more about making his chemical company donors happy than protecting the public’s health. This makes it clear, Secretary Kennedy has no problem selling out his supposed value if there’s a quick buck to be made for special interest donors, or political points to be scored.”
This seems as close to a solid answer to the question I posed at the start of this post as we’re likely to get. Kennedy, whatever else he might be, is not a true-believing crusader willing to hold firm to his beliefs. He simply does and says whatever will propel his influence and revenue. That’s it.
You’ve been lied to, MAHA people. Lied to and used to put in office the very people who have betrayed you. Let that sink in.
Filed Under: donald trump, executive order, glyphosate, health, health and human services, maga, maha, pesticides, rfk jr., roundup
Companies: monsanto
Comments on “MAHA People Are Mad At RFK Jr. And For Good Reason As He Reverses Stance On Glyphosate”
Not that it’s a comfort for the people who got cancer but supposedly to be harmed by glyphosate you have to pretty much be an agricultural worker who has worked in the fields with it for many years (and not have used protective equipment properly which they didn’t used to know). Not the exposure a normal consumer gets. Or go swimming in pools of it I guess.
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Having a swimming pool in a yard that backs on to a field sprayed with Roundup is also supposedly enough.
And because the 90s Monsanto study that everything else hinges on (and has now been retracted) said it was safe, Roundup was also sprayed ON crops in some places, not just used for pre-till dessication (where it’s generally safe as long as the workers are using proper PPE and the spray is done at ground level to minimize contaminating the surrounding environment.
The biological half life of Glyphosate is 10 hours. This means that a one-time exposure is unlikely to be harmful, but continual exposure in excess of 14 hours via food, water and other environmental sources can lead to a constant load, leading to cancer.
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You can still buy it to kill garden weeds and driveway weeds. It comes with protective gloves and maybe other things. My dad uses it and I’ve seen him with the protective equipment on spraying the driveway.
This is one of those rule of goats type scenarios where it functionally doesn’t matter if he’s sincere or not. Knowing would only satisfy curiosity. It wouldn’t resolve the issue. It doesn’t present a weakness that can be leveraged to convince him to change his stance. You just have to call it out and oppose it where possible.
MAGA/MAHA has always been a grift (see the phones (oh wait, you can’t), the NFTs, the sneakers, the bibles…). Now they are just being a lot less subtle about it.
Like the poor spelling and grammar in the ‘Nigerian Prince’ scams, you weed out the less gullible and double down on the real suck- true believers.
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Grifters know that conservative folks are easier to scam than lefties. You just need to wave the symbols of loyalty (flag, holy book) convincingly. Then they consider you to be in the in-group, they let their guard down, and you can fleece them.
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And what about GMOs?
What makes this even worse is that most crops planted on glyphosate-treated fields are genetically modified; the seeds are advertised as “Roundup ready” and are sold by — yup, Bayer/Monsanto. And of course, you can’t plant the seeds produced by those crops legally.
(For clarity: I have no issue with GMOs per se, I just find this to be another level of hypocrisy.)
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Not only are these seeds “Roundup Ready”, but they are patented. If a farmer were to keep any of the grain that they raised for replanting or have any “Volunteer” plants sprout, they can be sued out of existence for patent violations. They HAVE to buy new seed stock every season.
Re: patents expire
They have been flogging ``roundup ready” for years, surely the patents will expire.
In the mean time they really abuse those patents. For instance, of pollen from a ``roundup ready” field drifts across the road to a normal farmer’s field, the normal farmer cannot legally replant his crops next year because they are contaminated with GMO genes.
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The original patents expired in 2014, but Monsanto/Bayer has plenty of other means of enforcing its monopoly, including patents on newer variations, patents on individual varieties of seed, and contracts that set conditions on buying their seeds to begin with.
I sure would love to see what they have to say about the efficacy of masks now, given how crucial they are for safety when deploying glyphosate as a herbicide.
So, does this mean they believe masks work for the smaller glhphosate molecules but not for larger covid-19 viral structures?
Nobody is as easy to influence as an influencer. Money, influence, power: everyone thinks they will beget you freedom, but you buy into more dependencies and cravings.
That is the foundation of corruption.
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This is something I’ve never understood. Maybe it’s because I was taught critical analysis or was just disappointed early in life, but I don’t understand hero worship / influencer following / celebrity culture tracking / etc. Even if I like and respect someone’s positions, I’m not capable of hagiography. Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross seemed pretty cool, but if you told me tomorrow that an investigation uncovered a child sex ring they were involved in, I’d be disappointed but completely able to drop any good opinions I have of them. I don’t imagine that’s going to happen, but nobody should be worshipped like that. Influencers as a “career” just seems to exist because people aren’t enabled to actualize their own dreams so they need a vicarious proxy, which is also fed by the media that they consume.