Walk into any New Age crystal shop in Sedona, Arizona, or a hot-yoga studio in Oakland, California, or maybe a socialist bookshop in Boston, Massachusetts. Look around for the kookiest granola grandma you can find. You know the type. She’ll drive up in a battered Prius with a peeling No Nukes bumper sticker. And she’ll probably be wearing purple sneakers.
Talk to this sweet lady for five minutes and you will likely learn which planet is rising in her zodiac sign. Ask about her health and she’ll tell you about her detoxifying juice fasts and how she avoids radiation from cellphone towers. She thinks Big Pharma is a big conspiracy and that vaccines aren’t “natural.” She doesn’t trust doctors but does rely on tarot cards when making life decisions. Oh, and the aliens definitely are coming, but she hopes they’ll be “higher beings.”
It’s all cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but mostly harmless. Now let’s turn to our new secretary of health and human services. He agrees with our hippie grandma about everything from vaccines to the dangers of cellphones. (He hasn’t gone on the record regarding tarot cards.) But where she is responsible for only a houseful of cats, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now in charge of our country’s entire bureaucracy governing health care, pharmaceutical safety, and medical research.
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.
Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images