Conor here: While the gist of Josephson’s argument rings true, I would have to disagree with the argument that it’s Bobby, the Donald and friends just now embarking on this effort to “disempower the underprivileged.” That is a bipartisan phenomenon, and one which has been going on for some time. RFK Jr. and the rest of the administration are taking it to another level, but it didn’t simply appear with this administration. Oddly enough, the following post only mentions Covid once in connection to RFK Jr.’s criticism of the vaccines. One could argue it should feature much more prominently:
So heartbreaking seeing this in the past tense, when I was warning five years ago about it in the future tense. https://t.co/rB5O9fY1rI
— tern (@1goodtern) May 14, 2025
By Paul Josephson, professor emeritus of history at Colby College and the author of 15 books, with 40 years of experience working in archives in Russia, Europe, and the U.S. on the political history of modern science. Originally published at Common Dreams.
Charles Fremont Dight has been reincarnated in the worm-gnawed brain of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. A medical professor at the University of Minnesota, Dight hoped to rid society of its unfit members. Dight, an eccentric who lived for a time in a treehouse, wrote about these unfit people in such publications as “Increase of the Unfit, A Social Menace,” and “A Proper Function of Society is to Control Reproduction.” Like other eugenicists, Dight believed in stronger immigration laws to keep the unfit aliens, but emphatically not people of Anglo-Saxon “stock,” out of the country. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising the Fuhrer’s efforts to “stamp out mental inferiority.”
Eugenics, a mainstream science in the early 20th century, sought restrictive marriage laws, isolation of the “unfit” in special colonies for the “feeble minded,” and forced sterilization to shield society from the cost of caring for its most vulnerable citizens. Recent immigrants with poor English, children who had what are now recognized as learning disabilities, Down syndrome Americans, and many others were at risk of being paraded before eugenics courts for summary judgment and sent off to isolation colonies. Once removed from society, the eugenicists claimed, those with better bloodlines would be freed of their burden to care for them.
A Registry of Eugenic Discrimination
Bobby Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience. Bobby Jr. wants to identify citizens with autism and place them in some kind of registry. He ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to build “a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables,” to determine the root causes of autism spectrum disorder, and to give Bobby and his team of autism falsifiers data drawn from public and private sources in violation of federal privacy and security rules. (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently signed an executive order to block the federal government from collecting these data related to autism and to protect “dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination” of Illinois residents.
The HSS database, like those of the eugenicists, will be subjective and impressionistic. U.S. eugenicists built a registry for the unfit at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York under director Harry Laughlin. Laughlin and his poorly trained minions assembled index cards about American families, often from a cursory glance at a person’s face and carriage, to create genetic family trees. The ERO believed they had proved a huge number of people carrying hereditary disease who could be identified to be isolated or sterilized; 80,000 Americans were sterilized.
Racism and Pseudoscience in HHS
Bobby Jr. shares the eccentricities and racism of the eugenists. He cut up whale skull found on the beach near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, apparently because he likes to study animal skulls and skeletons, tied it to the roof of the family car, and drove it back to New York, while the rank “whale juice” poured into the car and onto his children. Bobby’s interest in skulls may have been kindled by the work of craniologist Samuel Morton (1799-1851). In his Crania Americana Morton set forth a hierarchy of intelligence with Native Americans and Blacks at the bottom to justify their enslavement, removal, and other disturbing acts of violence against them.
Building on Morton’s thesis, racist scientists and eugenicists documented lack of mental acuity among African Americans. They assigned Blacks special diseases and susceptibilities, one of which, drapetomania, led slaves to run away from cruel owners; another ordained syphilis as a “Negro disease.” These racists believed that Blacks have a higher pain tolerance and weaker lungs that could be strengthened through hard labor (slavery). Bobby Jr. claims that Black people have a stronger immune system than white people and thus should receive vaccines on a different schedule. He observed that “to particular antigens, Blacks have a much stronger reaction.” Bobby Jr. has said that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS, and he reiterates the fiction that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Another leg in the eugenicists’ program was anti-immigration laws. ERO director Laughlin testified before the U.S. Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924 and its restrictions on admission to the U.S. of “races” considered inferior to the Anglo stock. On the basis of flawed data, Laughlin told Congress that recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were “socially inadequate,” and tended to “degeneracy, shiftlessness, alcoholism, and insubordination,” all of which were supposedly genetic traits. The 1924 act was easily passed signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge who believed that “America must be kept American” and that “biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”
No wonder Donald Trump selected Bobby Jr. to head HHS. Trump began his first presidential campaign commenting with conviction that Mexican immigrants were drug dealers and rapists. Trump draws on the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and the racial hygienists of Nazi Germany where a person’s genes or bloodline determine his or her capacity for success or violence. Trump said, “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes.” But the Trump family has good genes, although his convictions for sex and financial crimes might offer counter evidence: “We’re smart people… We’re like racehorses.” During his ongoing campaign against undocumented aliens and citizens with foreign-sounding names, Trump ordered white South Africans to be given asylum in the U.S., but pointedly not Afghans who fought for freedom against the Taliban, Mexicans, or any other “races.”
The Pseudoscience of Mercury-Caused Autism
The entire premise of Bobby’s registry is the fully discredited assertion that vaccinations cause autism which is based on a retracted and discredited 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. Wakefield combed his data, weeded out some children who didn’t fit, and carefully included others. Further, his research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
Like Dight, Laughlin, and other eugenicists, Bobby lies and misinterprets data to fit his predetermined and erroneous conclusions that vaccines cause autism. In one article Bobby “claimed that the amount of ethyl mercury in vaccines was 187 times greater than the recommended limit, when it was only 1.4 times greater.” He cited one study to contend that tuna sandwiches laced with mercury being fed to two-month-old babies. There is nothing of the sort in the study.
Eugenics and the Decline of Public Health
Bobby’s strange mix of false science will exacerbate such public health crises as the ongoing measles epidemic as confused parents deny their children life-saving vaccinations. Bobby Jr. hates vaccines. He referred to the Covid-19 vaccine as “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” The vaccine saved perhaps as many as 20 million lives. Kennedy has said that he only drinks raw milk. Doing so puts people at risk of foodborne illness, since pasteurization kills off pathogens. Drinking it may increase the risk of the spread of bird flu. Bobby wants to remove fluoride from drinking water and claims bone cancer, IQ loss, thyroid disease, and other things may result from its use. This is untrue. Fluoride prevents cavities.
Kennedy’s fabrications about autism, mercury, and other topics recall the misguided work of eugenicist Henry Goddard. Goodard was the director of research at New Jersey’s Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. He opened an early clinical laboratory to study intellectual disabilities. Tracing the lineage of one of his young patients and building her family tree back to the Revolutionary War, Goddard concluded that intelligence, sanity, and morality were hereditary, and every effort should be undertaken to keep the “feeble-minded” from procreating to eliminate them from the breeding pool. His study on the “Kallikaks” (1912) used touched-up photos to show the Kallikaks as inferior creatures.
Always lurking in the minds of this MAGA government are racist scientific ideas about breeding and innate intelligence; about the evils of immigrants; and about the need to revitalize science away from rigorous hypothesis and testing toward conspiracy, pseudoscience, and eugenics. Bobby’s eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the “feeble-minded.” Perhaps the registry will confirm what is well known: that increasing numbers of people identified with autism is largely to do with increased screening for and greater identification of people with autism. There is no epidemic. But, like a good eugenicist, he has determined his conclusions before the study begins.
Happy measles, everyone! Or, as Donald Trump says, he only hires the best people.
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If this guy had a serious line of argument he could have just laid out his reasoning, make his case from evidence. When he resorts to cries of ‘eugenics, fascism’ his authority disintegrates and his case fails. This all comes across as the work of a huckster, racketeer. Feel free to carry on. Your qualities have been noted.
As is often the case with liberal criticism of the MAGA right, Hanlon’s razor, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” applies. The Trumpist minions and disciples may be enamored of “replacement theory” but to extrapolate from that to an actual eugenicist program is quite a leap. Silly.
On the other hand, stupidity is the best cover an agent of malice ever had.
The “replacement theory” is a racial grievance theory. “Soft eugenics” . . i.e.– a program to quietly kill off the “weaker persons” from within the ranks of one’s own race — need not be racist at all.
A lot of last century American eugenics was class-directed rather than race directed. When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that ” Three generations of imbeciles are enough” . . . he was talking about “imbeciles” of his own race.
So, is Kennedy and his HHS ( and it is indeed his department now, as well as being DOGE’s department as well) a “soft eugenicist”? A “Darwin filtration eugenicist? Or in Lambert Strether’s word for it, a “stochastic eugenicist”? Perhaps that question should be studied in its own right, without getting it confused with “being” a “racist” or not.
Let’s not forget about Operation Rolling Jackpot.
But, but
“The vaccine saved perhaps as many as 20 million lives.”
with a government cited paper to “prove” it. The article is merely the oh so familiar Trump era tactic of argument by analogy. If it vaguely looks like a duck then it must be a duck. The prejudices of people like Hillary with her “deplorables” have brought forth the extremism of the Trumpies where facts are also optional. Rhetoric is all.
No doubt Kennedy is a gadfly more than expert and that’s criticism enough. Trying to make him Mengele to Trump’s Hitler is the sort of deep political thinking that has given us our current very unfortunate administration.
Lot’s of innuendo and guilt by association. RFK wants to build a data base of autists: eugenics. Another explanation might be that only through data aggregation one might find the causes of the increase in autism. No eugenic intent needed.
RFK once strapped the skull of a whale on top of his car. The logical conclusion of the author: he is a eugenicist as they had always had a fascination with skulls. Albeit human skulls, but who cares?
And about the covid vaccines: it is an indisputable fact that in VAERS (vaccine adverse events registration system) as well as in the data by the EMA (european medical agency) the adverse events associated with the covid vaccines are several magnitudes higher than those for any other vaccine.
That is not to say that RFK’s attitude towards tradtitional vaccines isn´t highly suspect. On the other hand it is high time to have a close look at other vaccines as well. It is nothing but a fact that in the US (and to a lesser extant in Western Europe) the number of vaccines given to children has exploded ever since Pharma was relieved of any liabilty for adverse events (in 1986 and as a corrolary congress mandated the establishment of VAERS). Therefore a rational person might conclude that it is high time to look whether all these vaccines are really necessary. After all the first principle of medicine is “primum non nocere” and not “most important are profits for Big Pharma”
My simple retort that agrees with you, is, that if vaccines were so flawless, why are they exempt from the normal product liability laws, which could, like any other drug, allow remedy through litigation? The simple answer I arrive at is that they are problematic and the makers are worried that they might be liable for damages – i.e., follow the money.
This unfortunately reads like a post from a blue MAGA subreddit, swinging hard from the very beginning with “worm-gnawed brain”. He collected a whale skull, therefore he is into Phrenology?
If RFK is a eugenicist then Margaret Sanger must be Pol Pot by this nutters logic…
Paul Josephson, eh? No wikipedia entry, hysterical TDS, writes this hit piece on RFK that reveals his intellectual shallowness and political agenda. Utter crap, this article. From a marginal scholar – it would be interesting to know how well his “14 books” sold. I guess it’s interesting to post this stuff to understand how low academia can go.
TDS on paper, hard to believe this guy is a professor.
Au contraire: in 2025, what many here would diagnose as TDS is a actually an unwritten requirement for a job in many corners of academia.
People may call this “Soft Eugenics” however we have more than 20,000,000 Americans with long Covid and thus seriously impaired immune systems.
When, not if, something wicked this way comes we could easily see 1,000,000 or more deaths in month.
Are they going to blame it on the butler, or will it be “Hoocoodanode?
You’ll get your answer in a year unfortunately
Another opinion on RFK Jr. from someone who has been following JFK Jr’s career along with that of many other anti-vaxers and various other quacks and grifters for years.
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2025/05/01/soft-eugenics-of-maha-rfk-jr-autism-dr-oz-patriotic-duty/
RFK Jr was dangerous before the new job. Now….
@
Tom67
it is an indisputable fact that in VAERS (vaccine adverse events registration system) as well as in the data by the EMA (european medical agency) the adverse events associated with the covid vaccines are several magnitudes higher than those for any other vaccine.
Anyone can put anything in to VAERS and I believe the same is true in the EMA surveillance database.
IIRC someone once claimed in VAERS, that some treament had changed him into the Incredible Hulk. This might have been true but I am a bit dubious.
that is quite a leap. Sure anyone CAN put anything into VAERS, but how often does that really happen?
After all…. Anyone can vote multiple times.. in different jurisdictions..( All you have to do is create false identities, falsify paperwork for a period of time, and drive around all day to various polling sites.. and send out falsified mail in ballots..)… but really how often DO THEY?
No, it is false to state that any can put anything into VAERS. Please do not spread misinformation.
We have described repeatedly how IM Doc has had his efforts to get quite a few Covid vaccine injuries into VARES rejected.
I am sorry but if IM Doc must intervene to stop something going into VAERS it tends to suggest that just about anything can go in unless stopped by a non-VAERS party.
Woswers, you REALLY misread what I wrote.
IM Doc SUBMITTED vaccine injury reports to VAERS that were rejected.
I found this one, on a death report, via a search in my e-mails:
Over later e-mails, he reported the difficulty of getting a number to call VAERS, being routed, being put on hold forever, leaving messages, being promised callbacks that never came.
****
Here is another one. I have put the punch line at the end in bold and italics.
*****
This happened last Sunday – I have been struggling with the patient’s life since that time.
He is a 27 year old athletic male – snowboarder in the winter – and in the summer is a river guide.
He had the 2nd Moderna vaccine on FRI about 3 PM. He had an entire night of chest pain, severe SOB, and fever and chills. The bed was soaked twice during the night. By SAT AM his girlfriend was becoming concerned because he was having trouble breathing and was lethargic. They called me on SAT the 22nd. I met them at the hospital. Profoundly hypoxic. Struggling for air. Again – a profoundly athletic individual – he could not move across the room.
I took a photo of his CT angiogram report that was finally done on SUNDAY the 23rd. I have never seen a clot burden like that in my entire career. The word “saddle embolus” means the clot was stuck right in the place where the left and right pulmonary arteries diverge. His left pulmonary artery was completely obstructed. There was just enough blood getting through the right pulmonary artery to keep him alive. And the big danger here is a cardiac arrest which occurs at the exact time of the clot’s arrival in the saddle. Because he is so healthy – that did not happen.
He has zero blood clotting abnormalities in tests this week – and not a sign of cancer anywhere in his body.
They keep telling us this is a coincidence – that it is not the vaccine. I can assure you 27 year old jocks simply do not do this. It is so strangely odd that all of these coincidences start within hours of the vaccine. A case report from the big pulmonary medicine journal from 2017 is the only source I could find to describe the demographics of these saddle emboli. Out of 1800 patients in the state of Massachusetts for the preceding 2 years – there were only 2 saddle emboli – and both were in known blood clotting issues. Only 14 patients under 40 were in the group of 1800 pulmonary emboli of any kind – and all 14 had an immediately apparent clotting issue. This is consistent with my experience with pulmonary emboli.
Because of very complicated issues mainly having to do with insurance – he could not be transferred. I have been in constant contact with the critical care and hem-onc teams at the big academic center. His blood was sent to the immunology lab and just on Friday we learned that his blood from the 23rd – about 36 hours from the vaccine still had quite a bit of the S protein – spike – probably from the vaccine. The nucleocapsid antigens were negative – therefore, no acute COVID viruses – just the spike. We did give him clot busters – with some fear and dressed in sackcloth and ashes. This has helped tremendously and he is doing much better – still cannot give heparin.
This will all be going to VAERS – FYI – not a single one – not one of the 11 complications and 1 death I have turned into VAERS has appeared on the website. This is dating back to January.
****
That e-mail was as of June 1, 2021. He had later vaccine injuries and I am sure he triedto report them to VAERS. I do not recall him ever saying one of his cases actually got into the database.
Thanks. As I hope regulars know, I am extremely pro-vax. Yet I felt 99% sure one of my 4 COVID infections was attributed to when we in Uk switched from AZ to MRNA ones.
I told myself I was being dumb. But the OFFICIAL long covid service now set up by Uk NHS explicitly asks about your first mRNA vaccine. No way is that an accident. I have 25 years of survey research (mostly in health) to know this.
I refuse all mRNA vaccines now. Not because they’re definitely dangerous but because they avoided proper testing and identifications of vulnerable groups. I get my flu vax every year pronto.
Top tip: when a govt funded service is set up which asks you suspect questions, you’re NOT being paranoid.
I remember Confucius once having said that ” From time to time we need a rectification of language”.
Isn’t the mRNA technology very different than all the classical and neo-classical vaccines which were invented up to that point? Should we even be calling these mRNA “vaccines” vaccines at all? Shouldn’t we be calling them something like mRNA para-vaccinoids so as to be clear on the difference?
( That having been said, I accepted and recieved 2 Moderna mRNA para-vaccinoidations for Covid and then a Pfizer mRNA para-vaccinoid booster for Covid over the time of Peak Covid Danger. At my age and weight and co-existing co-morbidities, it seemed the least risky choice to make. And luckily I had no ill effects that I know of from any of my 3 mRNA para-vaccinoidations. And no ill effects that I so far know of from my one percieved-to-be-mild covid infection so far either.)
IM Doc is such a tremendous man and what luck he publishes on NC. Thanks for posting this!
One of the worst diatribes against RFK Jr I’ve seen.
Can you give us a good diatribe?
No, I think all diatribes are bad.
The author mentions the denial of entry to “Afghans who fought for freedom against the Taliban.” Whose freedom would that be?
What a hatchet job. Almost stopped reading after the leap from his interest in skulls to some random skull-related eugenicist. Glad to see other commenters piling on.
I wish I had the link, but a while back I was reading about the mercury in older vaccines and how the specific chemical form couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier. however I found a US NIH document describing how that compound breaks down in the body to two others that do cross, and thus mercury can get into the brain.
I Did appreciate the link to Fauci’s book. Hadn’t realized that AIDS had been so heavily politicized and distorted in Africa.
Seemed to me the article was mostly warmed over condensations of SJ Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. Morton, Lombroso, Goddard all figure as villains therein. But the author added whale juice to the cocktail. I am more or less opposed to all that the authoe opposes but it doesn’t seem to me that his article does any credit to that opposition. Loose strings of association do not an argument make.