RFK Jr. is laundering Christian right views as MAHA

[marmar]

RFK Jr. is laundering Christian right views as MAHA
Christian conservatives know they have a branding problem with women

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published May 19, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) At first blush, Casey Means seems like the last person Christian conservatives would want as the Surgeon General. Donald Trump's new pick for the nation's top doctor, though she does not have a medical license, favors the occult-speak popular in the "wellness" influencer world where she makes her money. As Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan at Mother Jones documented, Means veers "in a more New Age direction" in her "medical" writing. "Perhaps the body is simply the material ‘radio receiver’ through which we can ‘tune in’ to the divine," she mused in her October newsletter, where she also speculated about "the vibration of humanity" and how the "future of medicine will be about light." In another, she wrote about how she found love after she built a "small meditation shrine in my house," performed "full moon ceremonies," and spoke with trees, "letting them know I was ready for partnership, and asking them if they could help."

One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, did try to make hay over this, but she's Jewish and so is largely ignored by the Christian right on matters like this. But Loomer isn't wrong that, in the past, this behavior would get the evangelical world all worked up over the evils of paganism and witchcraft. So far, however, they're mostly silent on the matter. That's likely because Means is aligned with them against an enemy they hate far more than Satan: feminists. Along with her shrines-and-moons talk, Means also wrote that she had shed "my identity as a 'feminist,'" giving up on wanting "'equality' in a relationship" to instead embrace "a completely different and greater power: the divine feminine." It's woo-woo, but ultimately no different than the message promoted by conservative Christians: that a woman's role is as a man's helpmeet, not his equal.

Christian conservatives know they have a branding problem. Increasing numbers of Americans in recent years are rejecting organized religion, seeing it as cruel, restrictive and close-minded. At the same time, interest in a more vague spirituality is on the rise, fueled by "wellness" influencers framing spirituality as a shortcut to worldly gains like money, fitness, and romance. The Christian right was always more interested in social control than in Jesus. Increasingly, they seem comfortable with reskinning their retrograde ideas with the aesthetics of woo-woo instead of Christianity, so long as it serves the goal of crushing social progress.

....(snip)....

Casey and her brother, Calley Means, are tight with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy, which is why she got the surgeon general nod and her brother got a position as a "special government employee" assisting Kennedy. Kennedy has exploited the false perception that he's a liberal Democrat to bamboozle some people into thinking far-right health policies, such as slashing Medicaid, are "moderate" positions. Like the Means siblings, he's also using his appeal to people outside the religious right as a way to launder Christian right views. .......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/05/19/rfk-jr-is-laundering-christian-right-views-as-maha/

[CurtEastPoint]

1. MAHA? AHA!

[Skittles]

2. repukes lost their MINDS when Michelle Obama suggested healthier options

this is all just BULLSHIT, yet another COVER STORY

[Hekate]

3. Casey appears to be a complete moron. I don't think "divine feminine" means what she thinks it means...

She’s just another useful idiot in the trump administration, all woo and no actual spiritual (or scientific) content.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. Maddow Blog-The Trump administration's 'MAHA Report' cites nonexistent scientific studies

There's new evidence that the White House's “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again” relied in part on scientific research that doesn't exist.

In case this isn’t obvious: In a healthy political system, if officials released a hyped report on health policy, and the document relied on scientific sources that didn’t exist, those officials would be expected to resign — quickly. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-05-29T17:43:57.657Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-administrations-maha-report-cites-nonexistent-scientific-studies-rcna209732

With this in mind, no one was especially surprised when the White House report started crumbling under scrutiny. The Washington Post reported, “Some of the report’s suggestions ... stretched the limits of science, medical experts said. Several sections of the report offer misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.”

That was last week. This week, NOTUS advanced these concerns, reporting that the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report “misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions. Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all. ... NOTUS also found serious issues with how the report interpreted some of the existing studies it cites.

For example, the administration’s document listed epidemiologist Katherine Keyes as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents — except she didn’t write it.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”....

I would gladly make note of the defense of the MAHA document from Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services, but at least so far, neither the controversial secretary nor the Cabinet agency he ostensibly leads has commented on these new allegations. HHS did not respond to NOTUS' request for comment on the citation inconsistencies, the outlet reported.

Of course, given Kennedy’s recent track record, there’s no reason to assume he’d be able to answer questions about the document anyway.

To be sure, the traditional norms surrounding American politics have been largely shattered, but in a situation like this one, it’s worth emphasizing that in a normal and healthy political system, if officials released a much-hyped report on public health policy, and scrutiny found that the document relied on scientific sources that didn’t exist, those officials would be expected to resign — quickly.

Bob aka RFK JR does not want people to publish is the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine because these publications are peer reviewed and check sources.