In the eyes of the faux anti-elite contemporary Know Nothings, the “Mainstream Media” or MSM became a disease to be avoided in favour of the “alternative media” where those initiated in the esoteric knowledge and news stories that “they” (the government, public broadcasters, public health authorities etc) wanted to suppress, can get their fix. The coining of the phrase “alternative facts” by Kelly-Ann Conway, the presidential counsellor, in 2017 was emblematic of the firehose of falsehoods that Trump 1.0 launched from the White House. A booming MAGA media ecosystem amplified Trump’s lies and denials to such an extent that it appeared chillingly appropriate to apply to that moment Hannah Arendt’s observation in her 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarianism that:
the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists.[1]
Fast forward eight years to Trump 2.0, the central problem appears to have metastasized into one of stupidity. There is agreement across political divides that this is the pathology that is affecting the current administration. In January, a column in The New York Times penned by the centrist columnist David Brooks titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity” observed it was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next.” In the same newspaper in March, Hilary Clinton in an op-ed headlined “How Much Dumber Will This Get” stated that “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me. It’s the stupidity.” In April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour in an essay posted as Stupidity as Historical Force quoted Trotsky: When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking” – once the forces of reaction predominate, so reason gives way to insults and prejudice.[2]
The Signals breach of national security and advance of policies almost designed to cause grievous national harm such as tariffs and defunding of medical research. But the spectacle of a prominent vaccine sceptic and wellness crank, namely Robert F. Kennedy Jr, as Secretary for Health and Human Services adds a new dimension of institutional stupidity; it feels like an assault on human progress. The bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah and Florida at RFK, Jr’s behest represent the negation of the very idea of evidence- based government.[3]
The Words and Wisdom of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
A few anecdotes about RFK, Jr’s observations about health and policy based on them illustrate the qualitative step backwards that the US is taking under his tutelage. In the words of former Republican strategic operative Rick Wilson, he is a “heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths” who is dedicated to replacing “real scientists with radical eugenicists”.[4] Similarly, Dr Demetre Daskalis, one of the distinguished scientists and medical experts who resigned from the CDC in protest over the anticipated replacement of Dr Susan Monarez by an anti-vax crank, detected the clear odour of eugenics when Kennedy casually referred to the “superior genetics” of the “very high” members of the Trump administration who enjoyed such “good health”.[5]
And why would these observers come to such stark conclusions? Consider Kennedy’s comments on H5NI bird flu, in the context of West Texas measles outbreak in which according to a bulletin issued by the Texas Department of State Health Services on 12th August 2025, 762 cases had been confirmed since late January, in which Dr Duskalakis quotes him as saying that:
getting the infection is fine, really, because only the strong will survive… All of the chickens should get bird flu and the ones that survive are genetically superior and they should reproduce in order to reestablish the flock.[6]
Consider this piece of folksy wisdom Kennedy enunciated when standing beside Texas Governor Abbott as MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) inspired health laws were signed. Claiming that he could detect serious illnesses in children just by glancing at them:
I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airport today, as I walk down the street and I see kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges with inflammation, you can see from their faces, from their body movements and from their lack of social connection and I know that’s how our children are not supposed to look.[7]
Lastly Kennedy, at the height of the Texan measles outbreak, in an interview with Fox News in March 2025 recycled a commonly held myth but deeply mistaken belief among alternative health devotees about the building up of “natural immunity” to measles in childhood:
It used to be when I was a kid, that everybody got measles and the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life but for many people it’s worse.[8]
Though it must be pointed out that RFK, Jr did row back on this scepticism and encouraged take up of the MMR vaccine.
In the words of Thom Hartmann, these beliefs and assumptions amount to a 21st century neo-eugenicist manifesto; a moral excuse for selfishness and Kennedy and Trump have found a way to wrap it in the language of health and liberty.[9] This scheme is also couched in the language of ignorance and stupidity.
Wellness Casualties
It is an unfortunate reality that there is a sizeable and increasing constituency crossing political divides for the kind of pseudoscience and medical charlatanism that Trump and Kennedy trade in such as the bogus link made last week between Tylenol and autism. We live in an age is where anti-vax celebrities such as the model Jenny McCarthy boast of deriving their knowledge from:
The University of Google'; where publications such as the magazine What Doctors Do Not Tell You and the bestselling book Good Energy (2024) authored by Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, with a chapter entitled.
Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor have fanned the flames of rebellion against the authority of health professionals per se. A rebellion which has its origins in the legitimate concerns of women especially against sexist and patriarchal health authority structures and cultures and also the sensible notion that individuals should take a responsible interest in self-care including diet, exercise and medical information now uses “lived experience” as clarion call over hard medicinal evidence.[10]
Accompanying and feeding into this rejection of mainstream medicine is the culture phenomenon of “conspirituality.” As Derek Benes, Mathew Reminski and Julian Walker write in their 2023 book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, it represents “the handshake between hope and cynicism “. It welds the belief that our lives are being manipulated by hidden, all encompassing bad actors (Big Pharma, the Corporate Media) onto the comforting sensibility of the reiki healer, the homeopathic clinic, and the smoking teepee. They indulgence in self-care products, but also cloak-and-dagger political intrigue. They crave nurturance, but also dominance.[11]
But the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory and wellness woo-woo is having fatal consequences. In 2018, a study at Yale University of 1,000 patients with breast, prostrate, lung or bowel cancer showed that those used “complementary” treatments were twice as likely to die as those who did not (mostly because they delayed or refused conventional treatment.) A particularly harrowing and egregious case study of such waste of life was the case of 23 year-old Paloma Shemarani from Uckfield in East Sussex who died in 2024 after she refused - under the toxic influence of her mother Kate Sheramani a notorious conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer and deregistered nurse - conventional treatment after a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and opted for “five coffee enemas a day” according to her inquest held in August.[12] Serious consideration should thus be given to extend the remit of the UK’s POVA (Protection of Vulnerable Adults) to those who live under the care of individuals with such deranged and dangerous beliefs as Kate Sheramani.
These are the real-life casualties of the economy of idiocy, the business models of innumerable online influencers, celebrity brands such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop that validates hokum; of the Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) pyramid schemes in which wellness practitioners hawk their wares in a rigged market and those of Christina Northrup and Judy Mikovits and the other members of the Disinformation Dozen who while accounting for 80 per cent of the disinformation spewed out during the Covid pandemic according to a Centre for Countering Digital Hate report in March 2021 also collectively made millions of dollars in selling supplements and other snake oil products to their gullible clients.
But the major vector for wellness woo inflicted harm is opposition to vaccination. As I have previously written, where most rational and well-informed people see vaccination as social solidarity in action in that they represent not only self-protection and protection of others but the means of acquiring herd immunity against infectious diseases, opponents see them as an invasion of the body, a poison. A poison rushed into industrial-scale deployment by governments in league with Big Pharma and Big Tech.[13]
And the consequences of such pathological opposition to such medical innovation are easily quantifiable. A joint study in 2023 by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimated that between 30 May 2021 and 3 September 2022, at least 232,000 deaths in the US could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults. In June 2019, RFK, Jr visited Samoa, where the measles vaccine was being wrongly blamed for the deaths of two infants. After his visit, immunisation rates halved to 31%, more than 57,000 were infected and 83 died.[14] In many parts of the globe herd immunity levels against measles, mumps and rubella have dropped below the safety level of 95% due to the legacy of the unfounded scare about the triple jab.
The New Conspiracism
A framework for the mapping onto contemporary US politics and society of the macro stupidity that I have discussed is given by political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead in their analysis of the “new conspiracism.” Classic conspiracy theory (regarding for example the JFK assassination or the 9/11 attacks) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies, and alliances. Its toleration for coincidence and contingency is stunted while its claims for coherence and meaning are excessive. By contrast, the new conspiracism abolishes the need for and burden for explanation. Instead, there is repetition rather than evidence. It is all accusation and no evidence and substitutes social validation for scientific validation. To use Trump’s signature phrase, “if a lot of people are saying it, then it must be true.”[15]
The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs” of which the Disinformation Dozen of Covid denialists and conspiracists are classic examples. But while they identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, they do not explain anything, The only prerogative for the new conspiracist is to rack up the likes, shares, and reposting of their claims. Revenue raising is thus the name of the game.[16]
Rather than viewing absurd claims by Republican politicians and conspiracy entrepreneurs about immigration, tariffs and vaccines as lies, it may be more instructive to interpret them as the simple repetition of lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes – Trump and RFK Jr especially – in the conspiracist network. [17]
Such stupidity rather than mere individual pathology can be understood as a problem of social systems, as Andre Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas, and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. The wider canvass to this functionality of stupidity is that from the neoliberal critique of economic planning in the 1970s to Elon Musk’s Doge, political attacks on governmental and professional forms of authority serve the parallel project of opening space for overarching technologies of quantification, comparison, and evaluation. The underlying ideological rationale for “Big Data” is that its operation will happily render the theories, judgments, and explanations of human beings – with all their foibles, biases, and errors – redundant. The consequent outsourcing of judgement to financial markets, digital platforms and fusion of the two is also an invitation to people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason.[18] Think of the mathematical formula behind the Collateralized Debt Obligations which underwrote the global banking system’s support for the subprime mortgage market which led to the global financial collapse in 2008 and never trust the perfectibility of any outsourced and unregulated data system.
Ultimately, the best antidote to stupidity, is imagination which for Hannah Arendt is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative drawing on empathy and creativity in the process as opposed to the dry scientific methods not amenable to human ingenuity.
References
Accompanying and feeding into this rejection of mainstream medicine is the culture phenomenon of “conspirituality.” As Derek Benes, Mathew Reminski and Julian Walker write in their 2023 book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, it represents “the handshake between hope and cynicism “. It welds the belief that our lives are being manipulated by hidden, all encompassing bad actors (Big Pharma, the Corporate Media) onto the comforting sensibility of the reiki healer, the homeopathic clinic, and the smoking teepee. They indulgence in self-care products, but also cloak-and-dagger political intrigue. They crave nurturance, but also dominance.[11]
But the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory and wellness woo-woo is having fatal consequences. In 2018, a study at Yale University of 1,000 patients with breast, prostrate, lung or bowel cancer showed that those used “complementary” treatments were twice as likely to die as those who did not (mostly because they delayed or refused conventional treatment.) A particularly harrowing and egregious case study of such waste of life was the case of 23 year-old Paloma Shemarani from Uckfield in East Sussex who died in 2024 after she refused - under the toxic influence of her mother Kate Sheramani a notorious conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer and deregistered nurse - conventional treatment after a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and opted for “five coffee enemas a day” according to her inquest held in August.[12] Serious consideration should thus be given to extend the remit of the UK’s POVA (Protection of Vulnerable Adults) to those who live under the care of individuals with such deranged and dangerous beliefs as Kate Sheramani.
These are the real-life casualties of the economy of idiocy, the business models of innumerable online influencers, celebrity brands such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop that validates hokum; of the Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) pyramid schemes in which wellness practitioners hawk their wares in a rigged market and those of Christina Northrup and Judy Mikovits and the other members of the Disinformation Dozen who while accounting for 80 per cent of the disinformation spewed out during the Covid pandemic according to a Centre for Countering Digital Hate report in March 2021 also collectively made millions of dollars in selling supplements and other snake oil products to their gullible clients.
But the major vector for wellness woo inflicted harm is opposition to vaccination. As I have previously written, where most rational and well-informed people see vaccination as social solidarity in action in that they represent not only self-protection and protection of others but the means of acquiring herd immunity against infectious diseases, opponents see them as an invasion of the body, a poison. A poison rushed into industrial-scale deployment by governments in league with Big Pharma and Big Tech.[13]
And the consequences of such pathological opposition to such medical innovation are easily quantifiable. A joint study in 2023 by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimated that between 30 May 2021 and 3 September 2022, at least 232,000 deaths in the US could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults. In June 2019, RFK, Jr visited Samoa, where the measles vaccine was being wrongly blamed for the deaths of two infants. After his visit, immunisation rates halved to 31%, more than 57,000 were infected and 83 died.[14] In many parts of the globe herd immunity levels against measles, mumps and rubella have dropped below the safety level of 95% due to the legacy of the unfounded scare about the triple jab.
The New Conspiracism
A framework for the mapping onto contemporary US politics and society of the macro stupidity that I have discussed is given by political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead in their analysis of the “new conspiracism.” Classic conspiracy theory (regarding for example the JFK assassination or the 9/11 attacks) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies, and alliances. Its toleration for coincidence and contingency is stunted while its claims for coherence and meaning are excessive. By contrast, the new conspiracism abolishes the need for and burden for explanation. Instead, there is repetition rather than evidence. It is all accusation and no evidence and substitutes social validation for scientific validation. To use Trump’s signature phrase, “if a lot of people are saying it, then it must be true.”[15]
The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs” of which the Disinformation Dozen of Covid denialists and conspiracists are classic examples. But while they identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, they do not explain anything, The only prerogative for the new conspiracist is to rack up the likes, shares, and reposting of their claims. Revenue raising is thus the name of the game.[16]
Rather than viewing absurd claims by Republican politicians and conspiracy entrepreneurs about immigration, tariffs and vaccines as lies, it may be more instructive to interpret them as the simple repetition of lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes – Trump and RFK Jr especially – in the conspiracist network. [17]
Such stupidity rather than mere individual pathology can be understood as a problem of social systems, as Andre Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas, and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. The wider canvass to this functionality of stupidity is that from the neoliberal critique of economic planning in the 1970s to Elon Musk’s Doge, political attacks on governmental and professional forms of authority serve the parallel project of opening space for overarching technologies of quantification, comparison, and evaluation. The underlying ideological rationale for “Big Data” is that its operation will happily render the theories, judgments, and explanations of human beings – with all their foibles, biases, and errors – redundant. The consequent outsourcing of judgement to financial markets, digital platforms and fusion of the two is also an invitation to people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason.[18] Think of the mathematical formula behind the Collateralized Debt Obligations which underwrote the global banking system’s support for the subprime mortgage market which led to the global financial collapse in 2008 and never trust the perfectibility of any outsourced and unregulated data system.
Ultimately, the best antidote to stupidity, is imagination which for Hannah Arendt is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative drawing on empathy and creativity in the process as opposed to the dry scientific methods not amenable to human ingenuity.
References
[1] William Davies. A Critique of Pure Stupidity. The Guardian Long Read. 2 October 2025 pp.5-8
[2] Ibid, p.6
[3] Ibid
[4] Thom Hartmann. MAHA Madness. Bob Kennedy’s Cruel New Gospel of ‘Fitness.’ The Hartmann Report. 1 September 2025.
[5] Ibid
[6] Josh Fiallo. Ex-CDC Official Sounds Alarm on Major RFK, Jr ‘Red Flag.’ Daily Beast. 30 August 2025.
[7] Julia Ornedo. RFK Jr Shares Deeply Weird Way He Knows Kids are Unhealthy. Daily Beast 27 August 2025.
[8] Daily Beast, March 2025.
[9] Hartmann, op cit.
[10] Mathew D’Ancona. 'The Sick Age of Conspirituality.' The New World. 2 October 2025 pp.14-15.
[11] Ibid, pp.14-15
[12] Ibid, p.15
[13] Ibid
[14] Ibid, p.15
[15] Davies, p.8
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid
[18] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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