MAHA Madness: Bob Kennedy’s Cruel New Gospel of ‘Fitness’
Former Republican strategist and operative Rick Wilson called out Bob Kennedy as a “heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths” who’s dedicated to replacing real scientists with “radical eugenicists.”
And why would Kennedy be doing this?
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis — one of the top scientists and physicians who quit the CDC in protest over the anticipated replacement of Dr. Susan Monarez with an anti-vax crank — was unambiguous:
“I really hear the echoes of the word, ‘superior genetics.’ He referred to very high members of this administration and their improving health status. And said, well, that person has superior genetics… That is eugenics. Wake up. This is a red flag.”
And, Daskalakis wasn’t condemning Kennedy for some obscure rant or policy about cub bears, sawed-off whale heads, or research animals. He was, instead, horrified that the seniormost Trump administration health official is again paraphrasing Hitler, this time in the Fūrher’s insistence that Germany could only become strong if the state employed eugenics to prevent the weak and hereditarily ill from reproducing.
Kennedy — the guy in charge of our entire nation’s health policies and their implementation — was, the CDC doc told MSNBC — explicitly boosting the idea of “weaker” Americans dying so those left will create a genetically superior America. As Dr. Daskalakis said:
“So, fast forward to West Texas and measles, where he says, you know, getting the infection is fine, really, because only the strong will survive.”
And it was all wrapped in a level of weird that left doctors around the world aghast. At a marathon press event this Wednesday in Austin, Bob Kennedy, standing beside Texas Governor Abbott as MAHA‑inspired laws were signed, claimed that he could detect serious illnesses in kids just by glancing at them:
“I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”
Kennedy — an attorney with no formal medical training — is dressing up an old poison in new clothes and calling it the MAHA movement. It’s not about health, though, not really. It’s about resurrecting the old, toxic doctrine of social Darwinism and giving it a fresh coat of populist paint.
The message, stripped down, is the same one plutocrats have always used to justify their privilege: if you’re rich, powerful, and healthy, it’s because you’re “fit.” If you’re poor, struggling, sick, or broken, well, that’s just nature’s way of weeding out the weak.
It’s a twenty-first century neo-eugenics scheme, a moral excuse for selfishness, and Kennedy and Trump have found a way to wrap it in the language of health freedom and liberty. But it’s the oldest con in the book.
My old friend, the late David Loye (and his wife, Riane Eisler), spent decades trying to undo this exact lie. Loye pointed out that Darwin himself never reduced human progress to “survival of the fittest.” That phrase wasn’t even Darwin’s; it was Herbert Spencer’s. Darwin did pick it up later, but by then industrialists were running wild with it, twisting his science into an ideology to prop up inequality.
Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, was explicit: it’s not just competition that defines humanity, it’s compassion, cooperation, and the moral sense. He worried that “survival of the fittest” was being misunderstood, that it would be used to excuse cruelty. And Loye was right: Darwin would have rejected men like Kennedy out of hand, because they’re not standing up for science or truth but for a brutal pseudo-economic philosophy that elevates greed above care for others.
This worldview is nothing more than a justification for screwing the average and the needy while cutting government spending so morbidly rich people like Trump and Kennedy can get more tax breaks. It’s Reagan’s ghost rising again, whispering Ayn Rand’s catechism of selfishness, telling us that “greed is good” and compassion is weakness.
And just like Reagan, Kennedy is trying to pass this off as the “American way.” But it’s not.
The real “American way” has always been rooted in looking out for one another. Even the first president of our republic, George Washington, was personally involved in caring for the poor: he gave funds to the Alexandria Poor Relief Committee. That sense of noblesse oblige, that duty to help those in need, was fundamental to the American experiment from the start.
That’s not socialism; it’s basic decency. It’s also Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t say “blessed are the billionaires.” Jesus didn’t say, “render unto those with the best lawyers.” He didn’t say, “let the strong crush the weak.” He said, “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The gospel couldn’t be clearer: our moral worth is measured not by how much we hoard for ourselves, but by how we treat the poor, the sick, and the stranger.
Kennedy’s MAHA movement and the post-Reagan Revolution GOP spit in the face of that teaching. As John Kenneth Galbraith once put it:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
That’s exactly what’s happening here. RFK Jr. and his billionaire allies are recycling the same fraudulent morality used by the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the same poisonous reasoning that told factory owners it was fine to work men and women to death because if they couldn’t hack it, they weren’t “fit.” The same warped logic that defended child labor, starvation wages, and opposition to Social Security and Medicare.
And it’s been accelerating since the Reagan Revolution. Reagan idolized Ayn Rand’s brand of ruthless individualism, elevating selfishness as a civic virtue. He gutted government programs for working people while slashing taxes for the rich, and in the process rewrote the American social contract.
Ever since, Republicans and their wealthy patrons have been trying to drag us back into a society where only the wealthy thrive while the rest are left to rot. Reagan sneered at government itself, calling it the problem. But what he really meant was that government that works for the people is a problem for the morbidly rich who don’t want to pay for it.
Kennedy and the people he’s installing at the CDC and throughout our public health system are now running the same scam, draping their project in the rhetoric of “health” while selling the same poisonous brew of deregulation, disinvestment, “individual responsibility,” and cruelty.
Just look at the results. The United States today has the worst life expectancy in the developed world. Our people die younger, sicker, and with more preventable disease than citizens of countries that see healthcare as a right rather than a privilege. In Japan, in Canada, in most of Europe, people live longer and healthier lives because their governments take seriously the responsibility to ensure access to healthcare, clean food, and safe living conditions.
Here in the U.S., the rich buy themselves concierge doctors and organic diets while millions of working families can’t even afford insulin. That’s not “fitness.” That’s systemic cruelty.
Darwin understood that our species didn’t survive and flourish because the strong crushed the weak, but because we cared for each other, because we developed the instincts of sympathy and cooperation. David Loye called it “Darwin’s Theory of Love,” and Rianne Eisler documented across her many books how societies across history embraced egalitarian principles and so often rejected the kind of brutal patriarchy that Trump and his followers celebrate.
Anthropologists tell us that when early humans tended to the sick, shared food with the injured, and supported the elderly, that was when civilization began to take root. Dr. Margaret Mead told us she saw the beginning of civilization in a healed human femur from hundreds of thousands of years ago, something that only could have happened if the entire tribe had cared for its wounded member.
That’s the evolutionary advantage that made us who we are. Strip that away, and you don’t have a healthy society: you have a jungle ruled by predators.
And that’s what Kennedy and his MAHA movement — and the entire GOP for the past 44 years — appear to want: a jungle where the predators can get tax cuts while the rest of us lose healthcare, pensions, clean air, and safe food. They want to call it “natural” when kids get asthma from polluted air or cancer from toxic pesticides. They want to say it’s “survival of the fittest” when working people die ten years earlier than their wealthy peers because they spent their lives exposed to poisons in the workplace or because they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit.
That’s not natural law. That’s man-made cruelty funded by the morbidly rich and justified by pseudoscience.
We can’t let them get away with it. We can’t let this neo-eugenics movement masquerade as patriotism or health reform. America was built on the promise that “We, the People” look out for each other, that we form a government to promote what the Constitution calls “the general Welfare,” not to serve as a handmaiden for the rich.
Washington knew it. Lincoln knew it. FDR knew it. Every generation that has bent the arc of history toward justice has known it. The question today is whether we’ll remember it in time.
Because this is not just about RFK Jr., or Trump, or Reagan’s long shadow. It’s about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to embrace the morality of Jesus, of Washington, of Lincoln, of Roosevelt and LBJ, who all understood that caring for the vulnerable is the essence of civilization? Or do we want to embrace the morality of the jungle, where selfishness is recast as virtue and cruelty is excused as “fitness”?
Should America continue to be the only developed country in the world where healthcare is a privilege instead of a right? Or are we truly called — both by our Founders and our religious leaders — to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers?
David Loye dedicated his life to rescuing Darwin from the distortions of men like Kennedy, and to reminding us that our evolutionary destiny is not competition to the death but moral progress. We ignore his warning at our peril. If we let Bob Kennedy, MAHA madness, and his billionaire patrons redefine America as a place where only the strong survive, we will lose not just our health but our souls.
Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author of 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world.