I. How the Kakistocracy Became a Quackistocracy Corruption is a germ’s best friend Paul Krugman, Feb 17, 2026
Childhood vaccination is one of public policy’s greatest success stories. People who view the 1950s through rose-colored glasses, seeing them as an era of American greatness, miss many ways in which life was much worse then than now, ranging from gross racism and sexism to high poverty rates among the elderly.
One often-overlooked feature of the “good old days” was that many children contracted, and some died from, infectious diseases that have now been almost eliminated — or had been almost eliminated, until today’s right-wing anti-vaccine agitators set the stage for their comeback.
In many ways, the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy.
Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution.
Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade.
Both of these sudden policy reversals are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved approximately $11 in societal costs.
Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing.
The Trump administration has imposed a blockade on privately funded wind and solar projects, while RFK Jr.’s allies are pushing to prevent states from implementing childhood vaccine mandates.
And the damage from the assault on vaccines continues to widen. Last week the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s new mRNA-based flu vaccine.
They didn’t reject it based on evidence; they wouldn’t even look at it, in line with RFK Jr.’s evidence-free, dogmatic assertion that mRNA technology, which gave us Covid vaccines, is useless and harmful. Pharmaceutical companies, understandably, are retreating from vaccine development.
The motivations behind the crusade against clean energy and the crusade against vaccines are also similar. The conspiracy-theorizing hostility to science and expertise in general that underpins both movements also predisposes people to become right-wing extremists, which means that their movements are now in power. The headline on a 2023 article in The Guardian captured this perfectly: “ ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie’: Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”
Last but by no means least, in both cases it’s crucial to follow the money.
It may seem strange to think of the wellness industry as a corrupt and corrupting force comparable to the fossil-fuel sector. But wellness is big business. McKinsey estimates that U.S. spending on wellness is running at around $500 billion a year, while spending on nutritional supplements alone was close to $70 billion last year.
And sellers of nutritional supplements, unlike companies selling pharmaceuticals, are effectively allowed to make false, outlandish claims about what their products do. Here’s how the National Institutes of Health summarized the law:
Dietary supplement labels may include certain types of health-related claims. Manufacturers are permitted to say, for example, that a supplement promotes health or supports a body part or function (like heart health or the immune system). These claims must be followed by the words, “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”
In other words, it’s OK to peddle snake oil with false medical claims as long as you mumble some content-freeboilerplate.
And where do the snake-oil salesmen peddle their wares? Largely on right-wing media. After all, that’s where they can find customers who have the right mix of anti-intellectualism and disdain for experts. And the snake-oil purveyors are, in turn, a key part of the extreme right’s financial ecosystem.
I wrote about this almost five years ago. The relationship between quack medicine and right-wing extremism has a long history. As the historian Rick Perlstein has documented, extremists have been marketing medical snake oil, and snake oil purveyors have been financially supporting extremism, since the days when misinformation had to be disseminated through paper newsletters. This mutually beneficial relationship continued through the eras of talk radio, cable TV, and now podcasts.
But now we have entered a new era. As many observers have noted, the Trump administration is a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. A history of personal corruption is no longer a bar to high office — it’s practically a requirement.
Under Trump 47, people who have enriched themselves by peddling medical misinformation are no longer just influencing policymakers. They have become policymakers. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who appears to have made millions in salary and book royalties thanks to his anti-vaccine screeds, is now the secretary of health and human services. Dr. Oz is running Medicare and Medicaid.
In short, the kakistocracy is also a quackistocracy.
And the reign of the quacks will condemn thousands, perhaps millions of Americans — many of them children — to gratuitous illness and in some cases death.
In addition to attempts to send America’s medicines back into the dark ages by promoting quack cures and stopping real cures, the right wing has tried to destroy healthcare insurance for millions.
The Affordable Care Act is all but gone, so more millions of Americans will do without healthcare — and die. And then, incredibly, it gets even worse.
EPA Rollback End of an Era For Autos. US becomes outlier, no ‘emission standards of any meaning’ left By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times
The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official. The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.
That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped Thursday by its killing of the “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.
“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo Oge, who served as the EPA’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups.
“Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”
Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States.
Car buyers could still vote with their wallets, demanding more fuel-efficient cars.
California has vowed to sue to maintain stricter standards.
And the Department of Transportation still regulates fuel economy under rules meant to conserve oil.
But last year, the Trump administration proposed weakening the fuel economy standards to largely irrelevant levels. The Republican-controlled Congress also set civil penalties for violations at $0, essentially making them voluntary for automakers. In addition, Congress last year blocked California’s clean-car rules.
The bottom line is that the U.S. is set to stand apart from most of the world’s industrialized nations, which have mandatory fuel-economy or greenhouse-gas tailpipe-emissions rules.
The Biden administration sought to tighten emissions limits to encourage automakers to sell more nonpolluting electric vehicles. The Trump administration’s elimination of the endangerment finding is expected to face fierce legal challenges from environmental groups and others.
The endangerment finding was a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare. It provided the foundation for federal regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane, and other pollutants, including those from cars.
If the EPA’s decision holds, it could increase the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10% over the next 30 years, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. Greenhouse gas emissions are the primary driver of global climate change, which in turn intensifies heat waves, drought, hurricanes, and floods while melting glaciers and causing sea levels to rise.
It’s unclear whether the U.S. automotive industry will ultimately benefit from the elimination of emissions and fuel-efficiency regulations. The move could leave American automakers even more dominated by gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, experts said, as China and other nations continue to shift toward cleaner electric cars.
That could leave them at a competitive disadvantage in the coming years. “Our automakers are not going to survive,” Oge predicted.
President Donald Trump has swung back and forth on his opinion of electric vehicles. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he said electric cars would “kill” America’s auto industry. But he appeared to at least temporarily soften his stance at the urging of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and his one-time close adviser. In March, Trump said he would buy a Tesla.
It’s difficult to imagine a worse government for America’s future than the current, ultra-right-wing, Trumpian group of ignorant, dishonest, anti-truth, anti-science savages.
And did I mention the cruel, economy-damaging, inhuman Trumpian Nazi deportation strategy that is destroying the lives of millions of good, honest families, while impeding America’seconomic growth?
And what about punishing our best schools, like Harvard, for insisting on teaching the truth about slavery, bigotry, and sexism in America?
The right-wing bookburners are on the loose there, too, missing only white sheets and hoods.
The crucial question is whether Americans are smart enough to remove these traitors in the upcoming elections, or if we will continue our decline into third-world nation status, ala Russia.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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