Making Propaganda Great Again
The Trump administration’s new “assessment” of children’s health issues is a Trojan Horse. Don’t let it in.
RFK Jr. styles himself a maverick, someone willing to push back against scientific consensus and corporate interests in the service of common-sense measures to protect human health. Today, his commission released their “Making our Children Healthy Again Assessment”. Unsurprisingly, its littered with misleading arguments, cherry-picked science, and appeals to conspiracist ideation. And it ignores the two biggest causes of childhood mortality — guns and automobile accidents. But we would be remiss to cast it off as nonsense written by people who don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Because despite its deep flaws, it is still a rather compelling read. It is a sophisticated and well-crafted piece of propaganda.
There will no doubt be lots of effective debunking going on in the next few weeks by actual experts who are actually concerned with our children. I am going to do something different. I think might be more important to lay out the structure of the propaganda itself — to explain why I think it is so pernicious and so likely to be effective.
In the runup to the 2024 presidential election I had a conversation with a mechanic about candidates and issues. He said he wasn’t a fan of either side, but very much likes the “new ideas” coming from RFK Jr. (who was at that point campaigning for Trump). I prodded for more details, and his answers gave me pause: “we need to get these harmful chemicals out of our environment and food system,” he said. “He wants to make school food healthier. There’s a bunch of things.”
Being a food systems person, we ended up chatting about this for a while. Lax regulations and oversight of agribusiness came up. Round-up (glyphosate) came up. So did corporate consolidation of the food system. In other words, he was bringing up several concerns that I do not disagree with, at least not on principle. So, I tentatively asked about RFK Jr.’s stance on vaccines, and he said, “another example of corporate influence. We can’t trust that these are actually safe.”
The whiplash of that conversation has come back to me a dozen times at least as I’ve taken in all of the moves being made by Musk, Trump, Vance, and their minions. And it was back in the front of mind when I started reading the commission’s report. Because once again here I was, being presented with framings that, on principle, I don’t disagree with. It is only when you look closely, of course, that you can see influence of their eugenics and racism and heteronormativity showing.
This facade of reasonability is the first important component of the propaganda. He stakes out positions of “common sense,” but those positions are in fact a Trojan Horse for a much more subversive agenda.
Propaganda is, in a nutshell, the use of rhetoric — effective or persuasive strategies for speaking and writing — to gain allyship through deception. The propagandist does not start by trying to convince people to agree with him. The propagandist starts by convincing people that he agrees with them.
Who doesn’t agree with supporting children’s health? Who doesn’t agree with keeping conflicts of interest out of research on pesticide safety?
The Trojan Horses in this report are very good ones. There are lots of people, including me, who are rightly concerned about chemical pesticide and herbicide use in agriculture. And there are sentences in here very similar to ones I’ve written on this topic. There are also lots of people, including me, concerned with the fact that microplastics are showing up in our brains and reproductive organs. Or who are concerned with the plummeting health statistics of the US compared to other developed nations.
When taken together, the Trojan Horses in this report bring together a surprisingly diverse coalition of allies. Parents, regenerative farmers, conservationists, nutritionists, wellness experts, active transport advocates, critics of modern capitalism, antivaxxers, these are odd bedfellows indeed. I’ve no doubt that most people, if they read this report, would consider at least something in it to seem sensible.
But remember, they’re Trojan Horses. They’re not a gift they’re a grift. They are not genuine. They exist to only to gain people’s trust. To get through the door.
That is when the second critical piece of the propaganda kicks in: the worm.
The worm is the disinformation and deceptive cherry-picking of evidence that is designed not just to muddy people’s understanding of an issue but change how they think about it entirely. Think of it like your computer. The Trojan Horse gets the worm in the system. The worm then rewrites the system to serve the hacker’s agenda.
This report is full of worms, claims that conflate issues, misinterpret data, and misrepresent scientific consensus. Some are more obvious than others. But of them hint at the commission’s deeper agenda for Christofascism and social engineering.
One great example is buried in the section on youth mental health. Among sections bemoaning long screen time, villainizing social media, and hailing the benefits of being in nature, is a short discussion of research that claims that single parent homes are “are associated with worse mental health outcomes in teens.” The agenda peeks through: they get you nodding about the myriad challenges facing teens and then place the blame on divorce, single parents, non-traditional families. Of course they don’t outright say this, but they nudge the framing clearly in that direction. They seed a narrative that anything other than heteronormativity and marriage without divorce is bad for children and responsible for the myriad mental health epidemics they describe.
The study they cite for this was self-described as preliminary, contains clear errors, and is in a journal published by a group that has been described as predatory. The tell here that this is disingenuous is that they choose just this one study; there are many other studies that they could have chosen, but none that fit their argument so nicely [1].
There are many such worms in the report, some more overt than others. It misleads about statistics on federal nutrition assistance programs like SNAPP in order to lay the blame for health outcomes on behavioral choices. It tries to pass off beef as being “nutrient dense” (because it contains protein?) alongside similar but defensible claims about the nutrient density of salmon, nuts, and legumes. It frames fluoride as a “water contaminant” alongside myriad environmental toxicants of actual concern (and ignoring the massive public health benefits of fluoridation). It frames increased ADHD prevalence, at least where it is not purportedly because of non-traditional upbringings, as a product of overdiagnosis and overmedication. And it frames the conversation about vaccines not as a matter of scientific inquiry and consensus but one of regulatory capture by corporations.
Each of the worms is an attempt to shift our framing of the problem so that we become amenable to the strategies they propose. We’re not likely to accept their policies if we don’t agree with how they’ve defined the issue to begin with. They know people in America overwhelmingly support the rights of LGBTQIA+ people, for example; they must find a backdoor, and in this case that backdoor is child welfare.
These worms collectively sketch out a very clear agenda. They want to revoke public services, especially to the poor and the unhealthy. They want to revoke access to medications for depression, anxiety, and ADD/ADHD. They want to force people who rely on these meds, or who have disabilities or substance abuse problems into hard labor on farms. They’ve already started revoking access to vaccines so that more people to get sick and die in service of their eugenicist vision.
Experts on these topics will no doubt offer focused critiques of the individual things this report gets wrong, and that’s work that absolutely needs to be done. But we would be remiss to think that the commission got these things wrong because they’re dumb or because they simply don’t understand the science. Everything in this document is intentional. It is not a hastily produced essay by a disinterested student. It is strategically manipulative, and particularly in a way that makes their position seem far more mainstream and relatable than it is.
I worry that this document, and future ones like it, are going to be normalized piece-meal, and specifically by people and organizations looking for opportunities for common ground or trying to survive this difficult time. That’s the third part of the propaganda: the bait for acquiescence.
The report itself ends with 10 largely innocuous recommendations, and surprisingly, most of them are for more research. It is easy to imagine how organizations — universities, non-governmental organizations, the very ones being actively bullied right now — might approach this looking for a silver lining. Opportunities to keep people paid, keep research moving, keep the lights on.
It would be tempting to think that you can work from within these spaces of common ground to move the agenda from its most extreme aims. To make sure the science is “done right,” for example. But we already know how the science is done is irrelevant to these people. They will continue their narrative undisturbed and continue to bully until they find partners willing to tell them what they want.
I think the response needs to be the exact opposite: an overt and collective rejection of this document by organizations that people trust on these issues. I’d be thrilled to see organizations like Rodale and even my own employer decry this rather than looking for the areas of overlap within their own activities and theories of change. Put better information and plans out there that serves your constitutencies and mission by remaining truthfull and committed to the best available science. Admittedly, pushing back comes harder to some organizations than others, often because funding can be so precarious when you are trying to make the world a little better for people. It is on the organizations that can take this risk to do it for all of the ones that cannot.
There is an unavoidable complicity in engaging with any of this document. It is poisoned. Anything that comes from it will be fruit of the poisonous tree. If you concede any social license to the people trying to lead through fascism, the fascism wins.
[1] Not that the actual content of the studies they’re linking to matters: the very next bullet point in this section cites thisstudy that shows that rates of single parenting have increased in the US — without noting that this study found these changes had NO IMPACT on students’ educational outcomes.
