RFK Jr.’s MAHA Hallucinations
The real scientific evidence is the BS they made up along the way.
As political alliances break down, embarrassing leaks to the press start to speed up. So as Elon Musk exits the government, badmouthing Republican budget efforts on his way out the door, it’s little surprise the New York Times is suddenly getting the gory details on his campaign-trail drug use:
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstacy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
You know what they say: It’s always the ones you least suspect. Happy Friday.
MAHA: Make AI Hallucinate Again
by Andrew Egger
Firing and sheepishly rehiring the nation’s top nuclear safety scientists. Accidentally adding a journalist to an illicit war-plans group chat.
Yesterday, we got another addition to the pantheon of too-dumb-to-believe Trump administration controversies: As NOTUS first reported, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s much-ballyhooed “Make America Healthy Again” report, among a host of other errors, cited a number of studies that simply didn’t exist.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” one researcher cited in the report told NOTUS.
Whoops! This kind of sloppiness would create major embarrassment and a credibility-ruining scandal for researchers anywhere. For a MAHA movement that trumpeted its report as pulling back the curtain on unsettling truths they didn’t want you to see, it’s an inauspicious faceplant right out of the gate.1
And if anything, the White House’s attempts at damage control have only made the scandal worse.
White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt waved off the blockbuster story yesterday, acknowledging only some “formatting issues” in the report that “will be updated.”
“But it does not negate the substance of the report,” Leavitt went on, “which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.” She added that she did not know whether AI had been used to research or write the report.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon made a similar argument in a statement to reporters yesterday. “Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same.”
To understand exactly how ridiculous these defenses are, it’s helpful to dig into one of the passages in question. Here’s how the initial MAHA report made the argument that pharmaceutical ad campaigns are distorting drug prescription rates for American children:
While many more studies exist on drugs used by adults, two specific studies on children are broadly illustrative of the problem:
Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising for ADHD drugs in children were found to use vague symptom lists including typical childhood behaviors; the ads led parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.
Similarly, DTC advertising for antidepressants in teenagers were found to employ vague symptom lists that overlap with typical adolescent behaviors; this was also associated with inappropriate parental requests for antidepressants.
Both of these bullets pointed to studies that never existed. Once that awkward little fact was brought to light, the report was updated to read as follows (emphasis mine):
While many more studies exist on drugs used by adults, the impact of Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising on children is also highly concerning:
DTC advertising for ADHD drugs in children have been suggested to use vague symptom lists including typical childhood behaviors, potentially leading parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.
Similarly, DTC advertising is believed to encourage greater use of psychotropic medications in adolescents, including antianxiety, antipsychotic, and antidepressant classes.
As Leavitt and Nixon suggest, the “substance” of these paragraphs remain the same—if by “substance” all you mean is the rhetorical point at which the report’s authors are driving. But all the evidence supposedly underpinning the argument has vanished. Where the authors previously asserted a science-backed causal link between pharmaceutical advertising and overprescription—“the ads led parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately”—the authors now rely on weasel-word, passive-voice correlation to try to make the same point: The ads “have been suggested” to “potentially” lead parents to request drugs inappropriately and are “believed” to encourage greater medication use.
Now, is it plausible that pharmaceutical advertisements have led to drug overprescriptions? Of course! The report’s authors plainly believe this has taken place. For that matter, so do I! But the point is that this link has been hypothesized, but not yet demonstrated in hard research. For researchers devoted to following the data, this is a massive difference. Only ideologues determined to work backward, dressing their own preexisting conclusions up in sciency-sounding language, would describe it as a mere error of “formatting.”
This is precisely the danger that RFK Jr. has presented all along. We know that on issue after issue, from COVID to chemtrails, the man now helming our entire public health apparatus is an unreconstructed crank. We know he’s committed to a wildly distorted view of the scientific process, as when he pledged earlier this year that the government would uncover “what has caused the autism epidemic” “by September.” The man plans to use the authority of the federal government and its health agencies to launder his own crackpot beliefs into official policy. How grim is it that the best we can hope for is that he does so as carelessly as he did with this report?
No Hope for the GOP
by William Kristol
Yesterday I dropped by a gathering here in D.C. of organizers of Our Republican Legacy. The group, chaired by the admirable former Sen. Jack Danforth (R-Mo.), consists of Never Trumpers seeking to take back the Republican party from Trump.
My friends asked me to say a few words. I wished them well, and agreed heartily with the sentiment that it would be great to have a responsible Republican party again, and that there is much that’s admirable in the Republican legacy that could help point the way to such a party.
But I also felt I should briefly explain why I don’t expect to see such a party, and why I’d stopped thinking of myself as a Republican, even a Never Trump Republican. It’s not just that the current Republican party is indefensible. It’s that after a decade of ever-more radicalized and complete Trumpist domination, there’s little realistic hope, I think, for a return soon to decency and responsibility by the GOP. The Republican party would need to be thoroughly trounced, probably more than once, at the polls before there can be any prospect of that. And even that hope is tenuous, because, sadly, the rot now goes very deep.
And so, I explained, some of us are instead trying to do our bit to help the Democratic party prevail electorally and govern responsibly.
Who knows? History is unpredictable, especially these days, and I could be wrong. The Republicanism of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, of George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney—all the GOP presidential nominees from 1980 through 2012—could make a comeback.
But it’s awfully unlikely. Later yesterday, I happened across a recent report of a dinner put on a couple of months ago by the Republican Women of Baltimore County. At the function, several recently pardoned January 6th convicts from Maryland were honored.
“I whacked these officers,” 26-year-old honoree Steven Cook told the audience, according to a recording of the event. I can’t lie about it. I was one of the ones who started the, what they call, insurrection.”
The article continues:
The banquet audience wasn’t disturbed by Cook’s revelation of violence or his actions afterward. Instead, they warmly welcomed him and the others as new celebrities.
“He heard the call of God on that day . . . and answered,” Louise Baker, the women’s club president, told members, according to the video.
“I call them my J-Sixers,” Baker said in a later interview. “They were ready, willing, able, excited, enthusiastic and grateful” to share their stories with the club, she said.
If you go to the website of the Republican Women of Baltimore County , the group doesn’t seem to have been taken over by some kind of fringe element. Its leadership looks to be middle-class long-time Republican voters, normie Republicans of the sort you’d expect to find in a place like suburban Baltimore.
But they’re pro-January 6th. And a quick look at the rest of the website suggests they’re also pro-conspiracy and anti-vaccine and anti-immigrant. They’re comfortably part of Trump’s GOP.
I have little doubt most of these individual Marylanders are personally honest and decent and kind. They’re surely not like the Stephen Millers and Kristi Noems of the world, or for that matter the JD Vances and Donald Trumps, about whom one could say no such thing. But these normie Republicans have become the willing enablers of the cruelty and autocracy, the destructiveness and lawlessness, coming from the Republican administration they support in Washington, D.C.
Which is why some of us are no longer Republicans, and are unlikely to become Republicans again.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Don’t Fall for Trump’s Crocodile Tears Over ‘Judicial Tyranny’... During the Biden administration, MAGA loved that individual judges could halt the rollout of federal policy nationwide. They aren’t loving it now, writes PAUL ROSENZWEIG.
David Jolly’s Purple Campaign for Florida Governor… He left the GOP and now wants to replace Ron DeSantis. Are Sunshine State voters ready for a reality-based candidacy? JILL LAWRENCE investigates.
The Other American ‘Popes’... DANIEL GULLOTTA gives us a look at the weird, century-long history of Americans claiming to be pope long before Leo XIV.
The Return of Jackassery and Eliot’s Travel Report… On Shield of the Republic, ELIOT COHEN and ERIC EDELMAN discuss the president’s reliance on totally fraudulent evidence while ambushing the President of South Africa with a video alleging genocide against whites in his country, the Trump’s bizarre commencement address at the “Army Academy,” [sic] the purge of the National Security Council staff, and the continued sniping in the immediate office of the secretary of defense.
Quick Hits
TARIFFS RE-UNPAUSED, FOR NOW: As quickly as the trade war was gone yesterday, it’s back on today. An appellate court has temporarily unfrozen Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, one day after the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that Trump lacked the authority to impose them. The tariffs can go back into effect while the federal appeals court evaluates the lower court’s ruling.
Team Trump declared the short-term decision a victory, with Trump’s protectionism-happy trade czar Peter Navarro telling reporters that “the Trump tariff agenda is alive, well, healthy, and will be implemented to protect you, to save your jobs and your factories and to stop shipping foreign wealth, our wealth, into foreign lands.” What a relief! Meanwhile, the Liberty Justice Center, which had brought the suit challenging the tariffs’ constitutionality, shrugged off the pause (or the un-pause, depending how you slice it) as “merely a procedural step.”
Whatever it portends, the immediate impact of the decision has been to throw economic relations with other countries into—if it were possible—still more chaos than before. It was bad enough for tariff rates to go up and down at Trump’s mercurial whim. Now they’ve also started to flicker in and out of existence from day to day. Our hearts go out to anyone trying to make supply-chain decisions this year.
MD-BE-GONE: Here’s a grim headline for grim times. NPR and KFF Health News report that American doctors are packing their bags for Canada in record numbers:
In the month since Trump was reelected and returned to the White House, American doctors have shown skyrocketing interest in becoming licensed in Canada, where dozens more than normal have already been cleared to practice, according to Canadian licensing officials and recruiting businesses.
The Medical Council of Canada said in an email statement that the number of American doctors creating accounts on physiciansapply.ca, which is “typically the first step” to being licensed in Canada, has increased more than 750% over the past seven months compared with the same time period last year—from 71 applicants to 615. Separately, medical licensing organizations in Canada’s most populous provinces reported a rise in Americans either applying for or receiving Canadian licenses, with at least some doctors disclosing they were moving specifically because of Trump.
One expat doctor who talked to the reporters asked that he remain anonymous “because of fears he might face reprisal from the Trump administration if he returns to the U.S.” Which might strike some as paranoid—except that it seems completely justified in light of the administration’s response. A spokesperson for the White House didn’t comment on the story except to ask the reporters whether they “knew the precise number of doctors and their ‘citizenship status.’” The reporters noted that they “did not have or provide this information” to the administration.
CHIEF OF HACKS: Apparently someone—federal law enforcement is still trying to figure out who—hacked into White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’s phone and sent all kinds of messages impersonating her to all kinds of powerful people. WSJ reports:
Federal authorities are investigating a clandestine effort to impersonate White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, according to people familiar with the matter, after an unknown individual reached out to prominent Republicans and business executives pretending to be her.
In recent weeks, senators, governors, top U.S. business executives and other well-known figures have received text messages and phone calls from a person who claimed to be the chief of staff, the people familiar with the messages said. . . .
FBI officials have told the White House they don’t believe a foreign nation is involved.
It should go without saying that this is a massive security breach—but then again, Wiles’s boss hid nuclear secrets in a bathroom, so what were we expecting?
There’s tons to be concerned about here: Did Wiles do anything to secure her phone when she became chief of staff? If someone presumably less sophisticated than a major adversary’s intelligence service could get on Wiles’s phone, who else could? What did the impersonator ask of the senators, governors, and business executives they contacted?
As with almost every story out of the Trump administration, this one also reflects poorly on Pete Hegseth. After all, how can he be sure the Susie Wiles in the infamous Houthi PC Small Group was really Susie Wiles?
—Ben Parker
Cheap Shots
Regular Morning Shots readers will recall my item last Friday denouncing the MAHA report’s take on vaccines while suggesting that there’s “lots of good stuff in this report” on America’s food supply, overmedication, and underregulation. What an embarrassing moment to have indulged a magnanimous impulse! In the future I will do well to remember: You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to them.
I’m sorry, but people who celebrate January 6ers who gleefully admit to having whacked police officers are not honest and decent and kind.
"I have little doubt most of these individual Marylanders are personally honest and decent and kind."
As for me, I doubt it very much.