Report: Trump admin trying to rein in RFK Jr.’s unpopular anti-vaccine agenda
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MAGA is nothing but self-inflicted wounds at this point (most of them inflicted in attempts to hurt others, at that). If I didn't know they were doing it because they were complete and utter cousin-fucking bible-thumping fuckwits of such historical magnitude that they will be held up as a cautionary tale to the next 20 generations, I'd think they were trying to end their own party by exsanguination
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Why do you think it's called populism? Doesn't matter how many kids die so long as we own the libs.
(Yes, I know you went on an anti-populist rant after this, but don't let me get in on the fun too)
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I was going to write a snarky comment here, but I'm pretty sure it would just add noise to the (already) overwhelming chorus of intelligent readers here on Ars slamming their head against the table and screaming "Yeah, no duh Sherlock", but I can barely be bothered to keep my outrage meter properly calibrated against the relentless tyranny we have to put up with the current administration.
One week, it's outrage over the unqualified boot-lickers he's installed in his cabinet of fools.
Then it's outrage over tariffs, economic policy by the seat of his diaper.
Then it's his cabinet of dipshits failing so hard to manage being in charge of something that it starts looking like their plan was to destroy the government through sheer incompetence.
Then he starts attacking cities using ICE.
Now he's starting wars.
I can't keep dialing up the outrage man. It's already spun around back to 11+. His plan worked man; my dial is frikkin stripped, and twisting the knob doesn't do it anymore. The fools in charge of the government are malicious fools who seek any and every way to extract both life and money from their current tenure as our torturers-in-chief. Most of them have a misbegotten belief that GOD has ordained them the righteous shepherds who can do no wrong despite exactly aiming to cause wrong and harm to everyone below the anointed class (of being rich).
TL;DR is that I can't muster enough effort to care how badly the incompetent Ministry of Health hates the ignorant mutants running the Ministry of Truth in Trump's cabinet while the USA keeps supporting mass murder in the middle east, and is leading a war against the populations that don't pay billions of dollars to cozy up with the Donald.
One week, it's outrage over the unqualified boot-lickers he's installed in his cabinet of fools.
Then it's outrage over tariffs, economic policy by the seat of his diaper.
Then it's his cabinet of dipshits failing so hard to manage being in charge of something that it starts looking like their plan was to destroy the government through sheer incompetence.
Then he starts attacking cities using ICE.
Now he's starting wars.
I can't keep dialing up the outrage man. It's already spun around back to 11+. His plan worked man; my dial is frikkin stripped, and twisting the knob doesn't do it anymore. The fools in charge of the government are malicious fools who seek any and every way to extract both life and money from their current tenure as our torturers-in-chief. Most of them have a misbegotten belief that GOD has ordained them the righteous shepherds who can do no wrong despite exactly aiming to cause wrong and harm to everyone below the anointed class (of being rich).
TL;DR is that I can't muster enough effort to care how badly the incompetent Ministry of Health hates the ignorant mutants running the Ministry of Truth in Trump's cabinet while the USA keeps supporting mass murder in the middle east, and is leading a war against the populations that don't pay billions of dollars to cozy up with the Donald.
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That's my hearty laugh of the day. Thanks!
I have indeed discounted the gods. As a fan of Greek mythology, I'm a tad peeved at myself.
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The actual physical White House is not required for government. If you've got the votes, you can set up temporary HQ in an office building somewhere, surround the WH with razor wire, and turn off its electricity and water. They can exit via the waiting paddy wagon.
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Yahbut... they're not American, so it's not like they're human. Same as the way less than a dozen people have been killed in the war on Iran.
I swear, that's the reasoning. I dunno if it's homo sap reasoning in general, or just inhabitants of large superpowers with hubris, but (to paraphrase Marx) I don't want to be in any club that would have me as a member.
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Except that would be admitting Trump (or Republicans in the Senate) made a wrong choice.
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You can rest assured that billionaires, oligarchs, and top Republican officials (including the demented one) have all had their shots.
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Wrong. Males, yes (55%), but only 44% of the women. In fact, males by a majority in all age groups, though the percentage does increase with age. So it would appear that we our mistake was that when women got the vote, men should have lost it.
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Not because it has no basis in reality. Not because it's wrong in every sense of the word. Not because it will needlessly increase suffering and death for no reason beyond demonstrating one man's power. And not because it will mostly hurt children too young to understand how the hapless ignoramuses who claim to love them betrayed their well being and their lives.
A group of old, white crypto-fascist plutocrats driven by pride and hate, every one of whom belongs in prison, have decided to quiet down about their death cult because they're worried there might, somewhere, somehow be some sane Americans willing to get up off their sofas long enough to put a stop to it all, by whatever means necessary.
I hope their night terrors are well founded, and that the worst of their fears come to pass promptly.
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"We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” - anonymous Cheney-Bush Administration official, generally believed to be Karl Rove
Assuming we have a free and fair Presidential election in 2028, and that a Democratic candidate wins and is allowed to take office in 2029:
If the next Democratic Administration is a bunch of Garlands, Schumers, Obamas, Manchins, and Liebermans just wanting to look forward not back, play nice with their Strong Daddy Rethug friends and stay inside the guardrails obeying the hall monitors then any hope of regaining freedom and decency in the United States is finished. The only thing that could save us is a Civil War Grant/Sherman approach and focus on results. Yeah, I know, abyss and all that. Currently we are being pushed into the abyss with one last hope for survival.
I'll leave it to the appropriately aggressive legal eagles to find cause and standing. First place to look would be campign finance law and the priceless amount of in-kind contributions to his Presidential campaign that RFK Joker is now known to have received from Bari Weiss via her grooming/killing of investigations into Kennedy and his history. Then there is expense reporting and reimbursement: in 45 years of corporate employment I don't know a single person who couldn't have been fired for 'filing a false expense report'; federal gov't expense reporting is 3x tighter than corporate and I doubt there's a single member of the Trump administration who hasn't filed more than $5000 of out-of-regulation reimbursement. And so forth. Then there is working with Samoa on charges of negligant homicide over the deaths of the children there.
But you know what? Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Dubya didn't hesitate to declare people enemies of the state and stuff then in Guantanmo Bay prison for life and I wouldn't hesitate to do the same to RFK and a few others either.
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Not quite. We are now making public health decisions based on whether they will get Republicans unelected in November 2026.
That is the rationale for the pollster, who is a Republican political operative and election engineer.
He works for and reports to the president and the chief of staff, and all three know that if the Republican Party loses the House (and the Senate) in the coming election then they will have a much more difficult time in executing the rest of the Party's agenda, e.g. Project 2025, more wars, dance halls, etc.
The popular opinion on the vaccines or public health or the Secretary do not matter. The only thing that matters is engineering the election so as to keep a majority. (Also, engineering that election will of necessity include other measures legal and otherwise, that we are seeing roll out to the states and districts.)
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Wildly popular and absolutely needed for ALL billionaires if we want any chance of building a civilization.
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There is a VERY easy way to solve this issue:
Simply push a bill that requires all school districts with more then 1 school at each grade to designate 1 school for where all of the voluntarily no-fully-vaxed students and teachers MUST attend. That means the other schools will have students/teachers that are fully vaxed or medically unable to get various vaccines due to allergies ( nobody is allergic to all of the vaccines ).
This would solve the entire issue about vaccinations within 2-4 years.
Simply push a bill that requires all school districts with more then 1 school at each grade to designate 1 school for where all of the voluntarily no-fully-vaxed students and teachers MUST attend. That means the other schools will have students/teachers that are fully vaxed or medically unable to get various vaccines due to allergies ( nobody is allergic to all of the vaccines ).
This would solve the entire issue about vaccinations within 2-4 years.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Personally, I blame the shit-show which was the post-civil war reconstruction.
The lesson eventually learned by Europe after centuries of war culminating in the second world war was that "If assholes arise among you, suppress them and grind them into pulp lest they fuck you over along with everyone else in their boundless malice. We can't afford this shit again!".
The lesson the US somehow took with it from their sole civil war was "Never fight your brother, even if he's an asshole. If you can't get along with him, be civil".
...and for one and a half centuries that "brother" has done his damndest best to poison every well, sabotage every effort to progress, and stifle every attempt to build a nation subscribing to even the most basic of human values...while belting out, incessantly, agitprop worthy of Orwell for long enough even those who should have been more reasonable and sane believed the southern bigot when he was churning out constitutional one-liners non-stop.
The way the reconstruction should have ended was like Nürnberg. With every last damn traitor eager to murder other people rather than be forced to treat brown men and women like they were human hung at the gallows.
We liberals and progressives keep forgetting the most important lesson of all which is that reason is a great tool which can only be applied to the reasonable.
To bigots and fascist an invite to a debate is only an invite to sink the dagger. An olive branch extended only a guard dropped to punch past. A gun lowered only an invitation to pull the trigger. Because they can not be reasoned out of a position they never reasoned themselves into in the first place. Some people are just simply malicious and will not stop being so until they discover that the consequences they invite are more than they want to bear.
The only cure for a certain type of asshole is suppression and violence until they stop being assholes. It's that simple.
Yet in the US the republicans have now won the game their spiritual predecessors began. The unjust man demanded the opposition meet them in the middle. Very reasonably the opposition did so. Better than let the angry other guy lose his shit completely and get violent, surely.
Then the unjust man took a step back and repeated the demand.
Rinse and repeat. That is how the US got to where it is today.
And in the process forgot that those steps towards compromise were in themselves invariably a demand to allow for some bigotry.
Not righting wrongful deaths, theft and abuse against minorities.
A few more abuses against First Tribe nations.
Some more dead brown people. Some more normalized demonizing rhetoric.
The idea that telling the anti-semite they couldn't call an ethnicity vermin in public was a violation of "Freedom of Speech" rather than the worst sort of grand scale libel.
The entire premise that the US was one country, united and that they could all get along was dead from the start when it contained people who would not live and who would kill rather than suffer the other to live in peace.
Until the two fifths of americans who can't be arsed to vote because they either don't care about or are ignorant about this become enlightened to the facts above and realize that the smallest, most basic and unavoidable demand asked of them by their nation is to engage sufficiently in politics to vote the evident assholes and idiots out, there will be no cure for MAGA. They'll stick around, rebrand, and be back the next time the pendulum swings, while wrecking and fucking up everything they can get their hands on. As they have since the reconstruction.
Because the compromise agreed with the beaten confederacy back then became, in truth, a guarantee that the USA would become the safe space for the worst sort of scum imaginable as american mythology struck the existence of the irredeemably malicious from reality.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
<best (i.e. not very good) Elvis voice> Uh, thank ya vehry much>
I really need to put an /rant at the end of comments I write in that much affect. I confess, freely, that I am incredibly frustrated and despairing over the american situation. Because as is, I can see no way out until the liberals realize that the GOP is not an opposing party but an enemy of their nation and that the non-voters can be shown this.
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Yeah, try living here. It's alot dumber than you think.
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Yeah but here's the stupid part: Thy Knew This When DJT Put RFK in Charge From the Beginning. They Sure AF Did Not Go Into it Blind.
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Agreed wholeheartedly.
I think Trump 2.0 has caused that realization, though I'll also say the "resistlibs" of 2016-2020 were completely right about everything and it's a travesty that both the Dem politicians and the progressive/left wing voters of the Democratic party didn't listen. The latter are already justifying not voting for whoever wins the Dem primary in 2028, like they've learned nothing from 2016 and 2024. For myself, I'm a one-issue voter in 2028 and that issue is De-Trumpification/GOP Nuremberg Trials.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I was about to say "I dunno about that, I can imagine some pretty dumb shit"...
...and then remembered sitting up straight with a mién of utter disbelief literally every damn time Giuliani, Vance, RFK Jr. MTG, Noem or Trump appeared on the monitor.
Like Einstein I'm not sure about the universe, but I fully endorse his view on human idiocy.
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Why would anyone give audience to this man whose only real life experience with medicine is as a heroin addict?
Just not understanding.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Not so stupid. I mean, this is fascism 101. I'm pretty damn sure they knew damn well what they were getting and that it was exactly what they wanted in the first place.
Random Republican #1: "I dunno, we need someone who'll make people look away from everything else we're doing. This guy...bit Milquetoast. Don't we have someone dressing like a plague doctor who can sell the CDC on leeches and branding irons? How about the demon sperm lady in bossman's first term?"
Random Republican #2: "Well...we've got this one...We were saving him up but..."
Random Republican #1: "This is the guy. This is the guy we want for the CDC. Man, the bossman could shoot someone on 5th avenue and the only thing people would talk about would be what this clown put in his twitter feed earlier that day"
I could be wrong. I've swung my Hanlon's Razor so often it's worn down to a blunt stump. By now I just have to assume much or all pushed out by the GOP is knowing, planned malice and not just simple stupidity.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
<emphasis mine: standing ovation>
One of the biggest problems the US has is, imho, that liberals and progressives have kept assuming that republicans were politicians. They aren't, and haven't been for a long time.
Or, to specify, the people who have always been aligned with a certain type of ideology, who got beaten in the civil war, hung in the democratic party until FDR began putting black people in government seats when they left in outrage to first form the dixiecrats and later on be absorbed by the republicans in Nixon's "southern strategy"...THOSE people have called themselves different things depending on the times but they've always been a significant part of the voter base and they have never been anything other than domestic terrorists out to erase the nation they lived in in favor of a new confederacy.
Despite every democratic politician of older times such as LBJ being fully aware of this, for the most part the liberal and progressive voters have never wanted to realize that the greatest and most dangerous enemy the US ever had was living next door. The most horrid monster wasn't the soviet soldier (although the rape brigade which is the russian army certainly is and always has been pretty damn bad) but their neighbor.
I truly hope someone comes up with a magical way to neuter a hundred million grievance-addicted cultists short of a nationwide purge but it's getting clear to me that absent such a magical alternative the liberals who next manage to grasp power in the US will have the world's worst trolley problem on their hands as MAGA churns the "kill dem libs" rhetoric up again.
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Actually, if this story is correct, then the CDC needs to temporarily prioritize politics over literally everything else. Whatever it takes to get this absolute buffoon and his agenda as far away from the CDC as possible is what needs to be done. Then and only then can the CDC go back to science and saving lives.
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There were 10s of thousands of voters saying they voted for DT instead of JB to punish the D's for Gaza. On election day.
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Denmark is small, genitically homogenous, and has truely universal health care. Compared to the US. So no one is far from a treatment facility. (Every driven around west Texas or the Four Corners region of the US? Or in the mountains more anywhere?) Heath care records exist for virtually everyone. And the population is more closely related to each other so treatments don't have to be tested on so many different people groups.
It all adds up to a very different situation than in the US.
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It’s a terrible thing to say, and to have in your heart, but let us hope that Darwin works more efficiently and quickly going forward than he did during COVID. We can’t afford to have another generation of uneducated, unthinking, immoral, god-awful, MAGA voters. Given the right opportunity, they’ll take themselves out as a voting bloc. I just hope they do it before they thoughtfully remove access modern medicine for all the rest of us in the USA.
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I'm willing to bet Palantir has a pretty comprehensive file of my health care records.
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So depressing. Now I need to go read a positive, uplifting story about sneezing out maggots to clear my mind.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Yeah. This is what real evil looks like. Not the cackling Dastardly Whiplash tying damsels to train tracks while twirling his moustache. Not the Bond Villain set to irradiate the gold reserve to make a quick buck on his own stock while employing chinese hat throwing henchmen. Not Batman's rogue's gallery.
It's normal people too dumb, ignorant and/or gaslit to realize that they're voting for Hitler rather to "punish" the politician who wasn't fast enough to stand up for the jewish people.
Average Palestinian, addressing the 'pro-palestinian' americans out to punish JB: "Please don't be on our side anymore".
And of course, going back to the OP, the results of such morons voting the way they did, coming back to bite them.
I keep saying I don't want to dismiss american voters as naive children and village idiots, but watching people proudly stating that they're punishing the democratic party for X, Y and/or Z by voting for Trump certainly didn't make it easy not to.
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For 40% of the US adult population both of those are essentially zero. About 40% of the US adult population thinks that the Noah's big box (an ark is a box or chest) fable is a “true story”. About that same 40% that continually endorses Mango Mussolini. Around 1/3rd of the US population endorses astrology, and about 1/3rd endorses tarot cards. Obviously, there is a lot of overlap between those groups. But the point is, with that high of percentage of stupid people, democracy stands little chance of surviving. Trying to teach those people economics, or really anything, will not have a positive impact because they refuse to learn anything. There are poor people who do not fall into that classification, but how can you educate them when the Department of Education is being dismantled and universities are being attacked by the arrogantly ignorant? Some people work very hard to avoid the revenges of intelligence that comes with education. About 10% of the US adult population hold flat Earth views, and a whopping 40% are creationists. I'm relatively surprised that the overlap isn't a full 100% since the creationists' “infallible” reference is an obvious collection of very primitive flat Earth writings.
Mango Mussolini and the Heritage Foundation have taken what used to be the US democracy in the opposite, pro-corruption direction to benefit themselves and keep themselves in permanent power. Enough of the below 6th grade reading and comprehension ability US adults (about 54%) and anti-evolution bible fable believing US adults (about 40%) are just fine with that change. Even when the leopard eats their face, they try to blame it on the “elite liberals” (their derogatory name for the educated) who did not vote for the leopards. You can't fix stupid, and they have been furiously working to achieve that level of incompetence for decades by attacking public education in the US, ever since it was first formed.
Over 50% have a less than 6th grade reading and comprehension level. And destroying public education will obviously increase those numbers (the very reasons why that destruction has been continually happening). A barely 4th grade comprehension level and narcissistic career criminal US dictator approves of that direction. Anything to keep him out of prison and enrich himself, including the destruction of the US democracy. He simply cannot stop lying about everything.
“The non-German population of the eastern territories [areas of Poland conquered by Germany] must not receive any education higher than that of an elementary school with four [grades]. The objective of this schooling must simply be to teach: simple arithmetic up to 500 at the most, how to write one's name; and to teach that it is God's commandment to be obedient to the Germans and to be honest, hard-working, and well-behaved. I consider it unnecessary to teach reading. . . “ -- Heinrich Himmler
https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
https://newrepublic.com/post/172902/georgia-gop-chair-earth-really-round-many-globes-everywhere
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/05/17/flat-earth-us-politicians/83492658007/
https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/...ct-a-flat-earther-to-a-party-leadership-post/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2020...spiracy-theory-once-called-self-flat-earther/
https://www.bluestemprairie.com/blu...flat-earther-bret-bussman-district-chair.html
https://www.economist.com/graphic-d...cas-flat-earth-movement-appears-to-be-growing
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I always think the real Mussolini must be turning in his grave when people talk about "Mango Mussolini".
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