Democrats Are Probably Better Off Without RFK Jr. And Phoebe From 'Friends'
We should believe in science.
Whale head collector Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is most likely the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). This is a catastrophe for many reasons. Kennedy Jr. is a vocal vaccine denier and anti-science crackpot who likes to leave bear carcasses as gag gifts in Central Park.
Kennedy Jr. thinks raw milk is perfectly safe (it’s not), but he wants fluoride removed from public water.
“Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” he posted earlier this month on social media. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disagrees with him.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein is correct when he observes that the “crunchy, anti-vaxx, anti-corporate politics [Kennedy Jr.] represents used to have a home in the Democratic Party.”
For instance, Portland, Oregon has consistently refused to fluoridate its water. Portlanders have rejected measures that would’ve added fluoride to public water in 1956, 1962, 1980, and 2013.
Rick North, the volunteer chair of the advisory committee for the anti-fluoride nonprofit, Fluoride Action Network or FAN, boasted in 2020, “We are somewhat unique in terms of voting it down. We’re the largest city in the country that has voted it down.”
Studies have repeatedly shown that fluoridation of public water supplies is a safe, effective and economical way to reduce tooth decay for people of all ages. Portland’s anti-fluoride position is great for dentists but less ideal for lower-income people, especially those without affordable access to dental care.
Low vaccination rates in southwest Washington state, near Portland, led to a measles outbreak in 2019. The alarmingly high rate of nonmedical exemption for vaccines made the Portland area a “hotspot” for outbreaks. It’s absurdly easy for parents in Oregon and Washington to opt-out of immunizing their children.
Kennedy Jr. has long held bizarre views, and his family name probably ensured that he was treated more seriously than he deserved. However, he defended Barack Obama’s environmental record in 2012 and rightly blamed the GOP Congress for blocking progress on carbon regulation. Kennedy now eagerly serves at the pleasure of Donald Trump, whose environmental policies are worse than the villains on the old Captain Planet cartoon.
Klein argues that after the COVID pandemic, “there’s little room left for people with Kennedy’s politics in the Democratic coalition.” Democrats have become less tolerant of anti-science kooks who are an active threat to public health. Go figure.
The Phoebe fallacy
The “crunchy” hippies here in Portland who admire Robert Kennedy Jr. and think mainstream Democrats are too “corporate” remind me of Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) from Friends. Phoebe was annoyingly anti-science, which wasn’t just played for laughs like Cliff Clavin’s proto-QAnon antics on Cheers. She was often a sympathetic foil to Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), who reads now as one of those overly academic liberal “elites” who so offends working-class voters.
In the 1995 episode, “The One Where Heckles Dies,” Phoebe is defiantly anti-evolution, and not even for religious reasons. She just doesn’t “buy it.”
ROSS: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, you don't, uh, you don't believe in evolution?
PHOEBE: Nah. Not really.
ROSS: You don't believe in evolution?
PHOEBE: I don't know, it's just, you know...monkeys, Darwin, you know, it's a, it's a nice story, I just think it's a little too easy.
ROSS: Too easy? Too ... the process of every living thing on this planet evolving over millions of years from single-celled organisms, too easy?
PHOEBE: Yeah, I just don't buy it.
ROSS: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact, like, like, like the air we breathe, like gravity.
PHOEBE: Ok, don't get me started on gravity.
ROSS: You uh, you don't believe in gravity?
PHOEBE: Well, it's not so much that you know, like I don't believe in it, you know, it's just...I don't know, lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down as I am being pushed.
The episode presents Ross as an arrogant jerk who won’t accept that someone has a different viewpoint, but he’s an expert. He’s studied evolution at the university level while Phoebe was doing her own research in a coffee shop. The web wasn’t that world wide in 1995, so god knows how she formed her opinion. Ross tries to reason with Phoebe and educate her with facts and data, but she refuses to change her mind. She’s like Vice President-elect JD Vance, who thinks vaccines make you sick.
PHOEBE: Look, can't we just say that you believe in something, and I don’t.
ROSS: No, no, Pheebs, we can't, ok, because —
PHOEBE: What is this obsessive need you have to make everyone agree with you.
Democrats have struggled politically with a growing electorate of Phoebe voters who won’t accept a shared, objective reality. Facts must compete in the same arena with uninformed theories and whims. If Phoebe dismisses Ross’s demonstrated area of expertise, why would she listen to guidance from actual medical professionals?
In 1997’s “The One With The Cat,” Phoebe believes a stray cat is the reincarnation of her dead mother. It’s obviously not. However, Ross is once again presented as a jerk because he won’t indulge Phoebe’s unhinged fantasy.
PHOEBE: I believe this is my mother. Even if I’m wrong, who cares? Just be a friend. Okay? Be supportive.
ROSS: I’m sorry
How many Democrats have kept the peace with their MAGA loved ones who believe easily debunked nonsense? It does matter if Phoebe insists a cat is her dead mom because that makes her more likely to believe that the government created COVID. Crackpot theories are rarely compartmentalized.
Phoebe Buffay is annoying but mostly harmless because she doesn’t seem like someone who actually participates in the political process. She’s probably not even registered to vote. However, there is a significant number of real-life “Phoebe voters.” They are active in politics, as we’ve seen in Portland. They’ll support kooks like Kennedy Jr. over admittedly stuffy but nonetheless qualified candidates like Ross. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis seems to think that his political future lies in winning over the Phoebe voters. This makes him a far more cynical Ross, who respects Phoebe enough as a person that he doesn’t enable her foolishness. Unfortunately, these days, that’s probably how you lose elections.
The Phoebe character is part of a long pop culture theme that "experts" are usually wrong about everything, "common sense" is what matters--it's part of the greater "slobs vs. snobs" narrative (show me one example where the snobs were the ones we were supposed to root for over the slobs).
And audiences, rather than taking it as a "this is all just for laughs" approach have embedded this idea that the experts are usually wrong (haven't they been in the past? Didn't the experts tell us the world was flat once? So why should we believe them now that they say it is round?) and "question everything" means no longer believing in anything, regardless of logic or facts, because logic and facts are themselves to be questioned.
You know, it's depressing that fictional know-nothingism is now our reality. I assume too that since social media as we know it didn't exist in 1995, the Phoebes couldn't band together and metastasize. And Republicans hadn't figured out how to channel this yet. They did now and it's an extremely important part of their rightwing media human centipede.
After all, for the Phoebes, this is a good way to get one up on those eggheads and nerds who "think" they're smarter than you. And conspiracy thinking and woo make you feel special. You're not like everyone else when you believe that fluoride in the concentrations it exists in tap water is the worst thing ever. You're part of a unique club!
The brilliant analogies in this article made me weep a little bit, because it is true. And well this was the clear preference of those who voted, as we now fight to bring our health care back to the 1800s or earlier. (For the regular people; the rich will still have their vaccinations and top-of-the-line health care)